New book: Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science

Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science is an important new book that everyone should read. And its free.

It is a privilege to make available to you the book Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science, by Alan Longhurst [link Longhurst print to download the book].

The book is 239 pages long, with 606 footnotes/references. The book is well written, technical but without equations – it is easily accessible to anyone with a technical education or who follows the technical climate blogs.

In this post I provide a brief overview of the book, biosketch of Alan Longhurst, some additional backstory on the book, and my own comments on the book.

Preface

The Preface provides some interesting history, here are some excerpts:

But more recently, I became troubled by what seemed to be a preference to view the climate as a global stable state, unless perturbed by anthropogenic effects, rather than as a highly complex system having several dominant states, each having a characteristic return period imposed on gradual change at millennial scale. The research of H.H. Lamb and others on the natural changes of regional and global climate of the Holocene appeared to be no longer of interest, and the evidence for anthropogenic climate change was being discussed as if it was reducible to change in a single value that represented global surface temperature.

The complex relationship between solar cycles and regional climate states on Earth that was central to classical climatology (and is still being discussed in the peer-­‐reviewed literature) had been replaced with a reductionist assumption concerning radiative balance, and the effective dismissal of any significant solar influence. I found this rejection of an entire body of scientific literature troubling, and looked for a disinterested discussion of the balance between natural and anthropogenic effects, but could not find what I wanted -­‐ a book that covered the whole field in an accessible and unprejudiced manner, and that was based solely on the scientific literature: I found text-­‐books on individual topics aplenty, together with a flood of others, either supporting or attacking the standard climate change model, but none that was based wholly on studies certified by peer-­‐review -­‐ and whose author was inquisitive rather than opinionated.

One thing led to another and this text is the result. My intention has been to examine the scientific literature that both supports – and also contradicts -­‐ the standard description of anthropogenic climate change, and its effects on Earth systems: I undertook the task with an open mind concerning the interpretation of the evidence presented in individual research reports, and collectively by those who have been tasked to report to governments on the progress of climate change and to predict future states.

Because of my experience, this review leans very heavily on discussion of the role of the oceans in controlling climate states, but I make no apology for this: their role is central and critical and too often ignored.

Anthropogenic modification of climate, especially of micro-­‐climates, is undoubtedly occurring but I have been unable to convince myself that the radiative contribution of carbon dioxide can be observed in the data, although modellers have no trouble in demonstrating the effect.

Because there will certainly be some who will question my motive in undertaking this task, I assure them that I have been impelled by nothing other than curiosity and have neither sought nor received financial support from any person or organisation in the prepaatio and distribution of this eBook.

Table of Contents

1 –The crisis in climatology

1.1 -­‐ Climate change science: new paradigm or new community?

1.2-­‐ Estimating certainty levels in the scientific literature

1.3-­‐ Numerical climate simulation

2 -­‐ Radiative forcing of atmospheric processes

2.1 -­‐ Radiative forcing by active molecules

2.2 -­‐ Carbon dioxide

2.3 -­‐ Methane

2.4 -­‐ Nitrous oxide.

2.5 -­‐ Water vapour

2.6 -­‐ Sulphur dioxide, and volcanic activity: a special case

2.7 -­‐ Aerosols and particles, natural and anthropogenic

3 – Earth’s climate is not a closed system

3.1 -­‐ The consequences of the variable geometry of the solar system

3.2 -­‐ Environmental consequences of the Wolf sunspot cycle

3.3 -­‐ The relationship between solar cycles and regional climate state

3.4 -­‐ The 1470-­‐year Bond cycle and the glacial-­‐interglacial transitions

3.5 -­‐ Was there a role for CO2 in the orbitally-­‐forced glaciations?

3.6 -­‐ The probable effects of the coming solar cycle

3.7 -­‐ Lunisolar tidal cycles and global temperature

3.8 -­‐ The Holocene CO2 and CH4 anomalies

4 – Can a global mean temperature be measured?

4.1 -­‐ Consequences of patchy observations and doubtful assumptions

4.2 -­‐ Adjusting the observations and extrapolating over a global grid

6.1 -­‐ Regional anomalies in the evolution of SAT during the 20th century

6.2 -­‐ The use of proxies to understand the past: the trees do still speak clearly

6.3 -­‐ The thermal footprint of changes in land use and vegetation cover

6.4 -­‐ The thermal consequences of urban development

6.5 -­‐ The regional effects of anthropogenic heat of combustion

7 – The North Atlantic: moderator of climate states

7.1 -­‐ Consequences of changing wind patterns over the North Atlantic

7.2 -­‐ The density-­‐driven circulation

8 -­‐ The top and bottom of the world: two special cases

8.1 -­‐ Arctic ice cover during previous centuries

8.2 -­‐ Is surface air temperature really increasing over the Arctic Ocean?

8.3 -­‐ Why is the Arctic climate and ice cover so strongly variable?

8.4 -­‐ Is the loss of the Greenland ice cap imminent?

8.5 -­‐ The bottom of the world

9 – Intensification of extreme weather events

9.1 -­‐ The variability of cyclonic storms

9.2 -­‐ Droughts, floods and the ‘expansion of the tropics’

9.3 -­‐ Concerning storminess to come

10 – The ocean: sea level and acidification

10.1 -­‐ Rising sea levels

10.2 -­‐ On living on islands and coasts

10.3 -­‐ Acidification of sea water: uncertainty levels

10.4 -­‐ Experimental evidence for acidification effects

11 – Attribution and detection: natural or anthropogenic?

11.1-­‐ Formal attribution of cause

11.2 -­‐ Conclusions

Attribution and Detection – Natural or Anthropogenic?

The conclusions from Longhurst’s analysis are presented in section 11.2:

While I am aware that the general opinion of the relevent scientific community is that no further debate is necessary after five successive assessments by the IPCC, I suggest that this is premature because these conclusions concern topics that have not yet been properly addressed by that body, and so should be accorded status in a continuing debate concerning the influence of anthropogenic effects on regional climates.

If the peer-­‐reviewed scientific literature, with all the levels of uncertainty associated with individual contributions, has anything to say collectively in assessing the standard climate model, then a small number of conclusions may be drawn from the 600 peer-­‐reviewed papers that I have consulted:

• -­‐ the global archives of surface air temperature measurements are unreliable estimators of the consequences of atmospheric CO2 contamination, because they are already themselves contaminated by the effects of deforestation, land use change, urbanisation and the release of industrial particulates into the lower atmosphere (Sections 6.3, 6.4, 6.5).

• -­‐ users of these data are not able to judge the consequences of the adjustments that have been made to the original observations of surface air temperature ashore, although the limited investigations now possible show that the adjustments have changed the long-­‐term trends that had been recorded by some reputable national meteorological services (Sections 4.1, 4.2).

• -­‐ sea surface temperature is not a substitute for air temperature over the oceans because it responds to changes in vertical motion in the ocean associated with coastal and open-­‐ocean upwelling; the resultant change in surface temperature is independent of any changes in atmospheric temperature caused by CO2, yet these changes are integrated into the GMST record which is used to estimate the effects of CO2 (Section 4.3)

• -­‐ surface air temperatures respond to cyclical changes within the Sun, and to the effect of changing orbital configurations in the solar system: the changes in the resultant strength of received irradiance (and of tidal stress in the oceans, which also has consequences for SAT) are both predictable and observable (Sections 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4),

• -­‐ our description of the evolution of the global heat budget and its distribution in multiple sinks is inadequate for an understanding of the present state of the Earth’s surface temperature, or to serve as the initial state for complex modelling of climate dynamics. Future states are therefore unpredictable, cannot be modelled, and will certainly surprise people living through the next century (Sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.4, 4.5),

• -­‐ the planetary heat budget is poorly constrained, perhaps principally by our inability to quantify the mechanisms that control the accumulation and loss of heat in the ocean, where most solar heat accumulates; the quantification of changes in cloud cover is so insecure that we cannot confidently describe its variability -­‐ yet clouds are the most important control on the rate of heat input at the sea surface (Sections 5.1-­‐ 5.4),

• -­‐ the evidence for an intensification of extreme weather events and, in particular, tropical cyclones is very weak and is largely due to the progressively-­‐ increasing reliability and coverage of weather monitoring: todays frequency of cyclones and other phenomena does not appear to be anomalous when longer data sets can be examined (Sections 9.1, 9.2),

• -­‐ global climate in the present configuration of the continents falls naturally into a limited number of patterns that are forced externally and patterned by internal dynamics. Some of these climate patterns will tend to conserve global heat, some will tend to permit its dissipation to space, while all move heat from one region to another. Two dominate the whole: the North Atlantic Oscillation that describes the flux of tropical heat through the North Atlantic Current into Arctic regions, and the Southern Oscillation that describes the strength of trade winds, especially in the Pacific, and thus the relative area of cold, upwelled water that is exposed to the atmosphere (Sections 7.1, 7.2),

• -­‐ the recent melting of arctic ice cover over larger areas than 20 years ago in summer is not a unique event, but is a recurrence of past episodes and is the result of cyclically-­‐variable transport of heat in warm North Atlantic water into the Arctic basin through the Norwegian Sea; the present episode will likely evolve in the same way as earlier episodes (Sections 8.1-­‐8.3),

• -­‐ sea level is indeed rising as described by the IPCC and others, but the causes -­‐ especially at regional scale -­‐ are more complex than suggested by that agency and involve many processes other than expansion due to warming. Had the human population of some very small islands remained within carrying capacity, their occupation could have been permanent, but this is not the case (Sections 10.1, 10.2),

• -­‐ the consequences of acidification of seawater is one of the most enigmatic questions, and may bring serious biological problems, although it seems now that (i) marine organisms are more resilient to changing pH than was originally feared, because of the genetic diversity of their populations and (ii) the history of pH of seawater during geological time suggests that resilience through selection of genomes has emerged when appropriate in the past (Sections 10.3, 10.4).

Unfortunately, the essential debate on these issues will not take place, at least not openly and without prejudice, because so many voices are today saying – nay, shouting -­‐ ‘enough, the science is settled, it is time for remediation’. In fact, many have been saying this for almost 20 years, even as fewer voices have been heard in the opposite sense. As discussed in Chapter 1, the science of climate change -­‐ like many other complex fields in the earth sciences -­‐ does not function so that at some point in time one can say “now, the science is settled”: there are always uncertainties and alternative explanations for observations.

BioNotes

Alan Longhurst is a biological oceanographer who has studied the ecology of the continental shelf of the Gulf of Guinea (1954-­‐63), and the trophic structure and flux of energy through the pelagic ecosystems of the eastern Pacific (1963-­‐71), the Barents Sea (1973), the Canadian Arctic (1983-­‐89) and the Northwest Atlantic (1978-­‐94). He coordinated the international EASTROPAC expeditions in the 1960s and directed the NOAA SW Science Center on the Scripps campus at La Jolla (1967-­‐71), the Marine Ecology Laboratory at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (1977-­‐79) and was Director-­‐ General of that Institute (1970-­‐86). He has published 80-­‐odd research papers and his most recent books are “Ecological Geography of the Sea” (Elsevier, 1998 & 2007) and “Mismanagement of Marine Fisheries” (Cambridge, 2010).

I have been communicating with Alan for several years about the book. In preparing the blog post, I asked him to provide some backstory, and here is what he wrote:

“It started out with my being asked to talk abut climate change to an informal evening seminar club here in rural SW France, as the only scientist in the group. So I had to started reading into the subject, and because I can no longer give off-the-cuff seminars (my mind clogs up) I had to write a text. Then, since I was pretty much written-out in my own subjects, I didnt stop reading once the semiar was out of the way, so it snowballed and grew to book-length. My previous publishers (Elsevier for “Ecological Geography of the Sea” and Cambridge for “Mismanagement of Marine Fisheries”) wouldnt touch it, nor would any of the other top-line houses that I tried, and I thought that the book would not carry much weight if it were to go to a small publisher specialised in stirring things up.

One of my motivations for completing the book was finding to what extent ‘climate change’ had become a religion and the strength of imperatives to conform – which seemed to me not to bode at all well for the future of science. I have tried to emphasise that I really dont think the science is as settled as many pretend.

One of the things my research career taught me was that you cant understand how the ocean works from studying one region – just as I know that you cant make any solid conclusions about how the climate works from studying just the short period since 1960, which is what many people are doing.

I wouldnt have known that but for the fact I’ve had personal experience working (and travelling by sea, in the old days) in all the major oceans and in many dfferent marine environments: the tropical Gulf of Guina (where I spent almost 10 years) works totally differently from the tropical eastern Pacific, where I next worked from Scripps, and was able to compare the tropical pelagic ecosystem with that of the California upwelling region; later, I had the good fortune to work in the arctic (Barents Sea and Canadian archipelago, each totally different environments), and on both sides of the North Atlantic. Tthe fact that my research work has been done on similar processes in many diverse regions has given me (I hope) a good understanding of regional characteristics that prepared me for thinking about diverse and changing climates.

I was also lucky that although I held administrative posts at the NOAA lab on the Scripps campus, and later at the Bedford Institute in Canada, I was always able to keep my plankton lab going and get to sea at least once a year. My last 10 years were free of admin, and I got involved in the Canadian climate change programme and had a very productive time. The group I was with produced the first global computation of ocean primary production from the first satellite data and some of the first evidence for the dominance of photosynthetic bacteria in tropical oceans during a cruise that I organised in the eastern Pacific – which was a game-changer. My own work, once I left the African labs, was on the exploration of the details of how the production and consumption of organic material was organised in th pelagic realm.”

JC reflections

This is a remarkable book, a tour de force. There are fresh insights in each chapter, borne of Longhurst’s objective analysis of the data and the literature. The papers he cites are from Nature, Science, PNAS, Journal of Climate and other mainstream, high impact journals. I doubt that John Cook’s activist abstract classifiers would classify many if any of these papers as ‘skeptical’. However, each of these papers provides a critical link in Longhurst’s reasoning that produces conclusions that do not agree with the ‘consensus.’

I am reminded of this quote by Galileo: “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” The value of an independent assessment of this broad range of topics, by a scientist who does not have a dog in this fight, is extremely high. Very, very few climate scientists have personally dug as deeply as Longhurst over such a broad range of climate science topics. This reminds us that the broad range of complex issues surrounding detection and attribution of climate change are outside the scope of what most climate scientists consider, and one can only infer that their support for the consensus conclusions is based on second-order belief regarding many topics outside of their personal expertise and research experience.

Will everyone agree with Longhurst’s analyses? Of course not, although he presents arguments from both sides and extensively discusses uncertainty and doubt. The important factor here is that he presents carefully reasoned arguments supported by data analysis and citations of the elite published literature. In the coming weeks, I will select individual sections for discussion, that I regard as either provocative or controversial.

yes. since I wrote a HISTORY of what skeptics were arguing that would be the case. And he seems stuck in 2009 as well..

Um… no. That’s not what you described your book as, at all. You did not describe your book as merely a history of what skeptics were arguing, and none of the context of your claims about the surface temperature record implied you were merely describing what people had said about it.

‘Um… no. That’s not what you described your book as, at all. You did not describe your book as merely a history of what skeptics were arguing,
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note that NO where have I said it was MERELY a history.
its largely a chronology at least that is the way many people have described it to me. since CG is a story about FOIA and NOT THE SCIENCE.. you have to tell the story of willis’s FOIA and that means recounting the history.

and none of the context of your claims about the surface temperature record implied you were merely describing what people had said about it.

Go ahead and quote where I take positions. That was 2009 and if my positions have changed I will gladly explain.

Basically today I think there are still issues with micro site, UHI and adjustments. So go ahead quote where I explicitly state my position.

as usual you read into things when you want to and and read literally
when you want to.

But go ahead.. what claims did I make? Now too be sure I am sure some of my positions have changed because I actually started to do my own work after watching jeffId .. but go ahead.. my positions as you “see” them.

I’ll make it easy.

My position on data sharing, then and now
My position on CRU methods then and now
My postion on UHI then and now
my position on microsite then and now
my position on adjustments then and now
my position on the great thermometer drop out then and now
my position on essex then and now
my position on satellites then and now
my position on sampling then and now

I chided you for criticizing someone for saying things you yourself had said. You responded by saying:

yes. since I wrote a HISTORY of what skeptics were arguing that would be the case.

If you want to defend yourself by claiming you didn’t say you said it “was MERELY a history,” you can, but nobody will take you seriously. Your response to me was only responsive if it was a defense where you defended your mistake by claiming to merely have said those things as writing a history of what skeptics were arguing. If you said it for any other reason, your response wasn’t responsive.

Go ahead and quote where I take positions. That was 2009 and if my positions have changed I will gladly explain.

Um, no. I’m still waiting for you to go back and explain things where you last called me a liar. You even showed up to join the discussion when I wrote a post about it only to double down on your position, then ran away again rather than try to resolve anything.

So no, I’m not going to pretend you’re actually willing to try to resolve things. Because you’re not. The moment you can’t handle something I say, you’ll either run away, or you’ll throw out some pathetic insults then you’ll run away. That’s all you ever do. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed or experienced it.

You claimed that Muller said things he did not say.
I even explained to you in mail .
so you need to apoligize

No, you did not. As the post I linked to clearly shows, Richard Muller said exactly what I claimed he said. You showed up to try to argue he didn’t say what I claimed he said despite the post providing proof he did, then you promptly ran away and everyone just shook their heads at you because nobody could understand how you could believe he didn’t say exactly what I claimed he said.

And no, you didn’t explain anything “in mail.” I can show people every mail you’ve ever sent me. Nobody will agree with you any of them contain any such explanation.

You’re just making things up Mosher. The only person who owes anyone an apology is you, for calling me a liar for saying something that was completely true, and for continuing to defend your ridiculous accusation for weeks.

Well, I guess Muller also owes everyone an apology for telling people BEST had released data it hadn’t released. I mean, that is probably something he should apologize for too.

Actually, chapter 4 is arguably the least interesting chapter in the book (also the extreme events chapter wasn’t that interesting), unfortunate that people are focusing only on this chapter. Take a look at the other chapters please, some of them are gems! No more comments on Chapter 4, please.

> that is not what he wrote. Moreover, he was just quoting from the first step of NASA GISS QC,

Searching for “GISS,” I stumbled upon this:

It seems clear that what is presented in the current data sets has resulted from a multitude of individual decisions, big or trivial, made by the technicians responsible for adjusting the data; the complexity and magnitude of adjusting, individually and largely by hand, several thousand data sets surely requires that a careful record must be kept and made widely known.

Page 87.

With the Author’s own emphasis.

***

Interestingly, as if to please you, Sir Rud, there’s a mention of Ross’ analysis on page 83. One of the few Internet references.

Santa has a same ”PAUSE” between january and december… SAME as the phony global warming!

Warmist invented the ”pause” because there are still lots of people on the street that can think for themselves, and are noticing that IS SAME TEMP AS ALWAYS WAS… AND: to prove to the politicians and the media that: –” skeptics are capable of thinking and reasoning as three old kids, OR as a 60y old fencepost”…

the treatment of BEST is clearly inadequate. This is the only reference that I found: p 89: footnote 213: I have not referred here to the independent Berkely data archives, that I judge to be inacceptable in both format and treatment.

Is there any shareable reasoning behind that judgment? I don’t mean what we might reconstruct or hypothesize, but what in his case led to that dismissal? Maybe he will share his reasoning with us. Is there another “treatment” that is demonstrably better for summarizing the earth land surface trends? He does not name one, and I doubt that there is one that will be capable of any but small improvements. For example, it would be an improvement if we could ascertain and then use date and station-level information on the reliability of each observation, and use that in the weighted estimation procedure, but that is impossible.

He may be referring to the two facts that (1) BEST uses a lot of short records, so the sampling procedure is constantly changing and (2) they build a continuous global temperature field, which entails an infinite amount of interpolation. If he thinks BEST is the worst then I agree.

The biggest reason that ‘BEST’ doesn’t indicate what’s really going on is simply the resolution. BEST smooths out the actual variation. That may not matter much the resulting ‘global average’, but it obscures the small variation and cooling trend locations which are visible in the UDEL analysis which has the finest resolution. All indicate warming, of a similar extent, but better resolution gives better understanding than the nice smooth BEST. The real atmosphere is not nice and smooth.

“He may be referring to the two facts that (1) BEST uses a lot of short records, so the sampling procedure is constantly changing and (2) they build a continuous global temperature field, which entails an infinite amount of interpolation. If he thinks BEST is the worst then I agree.”

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So now you read minds?

You get the same answer with or without short records.
short records give you better local detail and smaller confidence intervals.
Also if you DONT like short records just “hold” them out
create the field without them
Then use the short records as your out of sample test.
you skeptics….

Finally, INFINITE interpolation?

Dude, all interpolation is “infinite”

formally you have a continuous function but in practice you grid
so not infinite.. ding dong

The other surface statistical models only use interpolation when a cell has no records. BEST is averaging a continuous field, so the station data is swamped by an infinite number of interpolations. BEST assumes a temperature for every point on the surface of the earth.

More precisely, BEST assumes a temperature for every point on the surface of the earth then averages all those temperatures. This is well known to be a rough approximation method, at best (pun intended).

“More precisely, BEST assumes a temperature for every point on the surface of the earth then averages all those temperatures. This is well known to be a rough approximation method, at best (pun intended).”

wrong. all those temperatures are not averaged.

The BE approach uses the SAMPLED locations to create a regression formula where the Climate ( think Koppen climates) is expressed as a function of Latitude and Altitude and Season. Willis has shown the power of this approach using satellite data.

The residual is then interpolated using kriging.

The temperature at any given point is thus given by C +W or the
climate for that point plus the weather for that point.

the HOME GROWN method of CRU and GISS dont perform as well
as the method SUGEESTED BY SKEPTICS!!!

jeez wojick did you miss all the discussion at CA and WUWT about how CRU and GISS were untested as METHODS!! did you miss the suggestions that people should use known tested methods, like krigging?
Did you miss McIntyres suggestion that methods papers be published first before results papers? and that GISS and CRU had NO METHODS papers?

“The other surface statistical models only use interpolation when a cell has no records. BEST is averaging a continuous field, so the station data is swamped by an infinite number of interpolations. BEST assumes a temperature for every point on the surface of the earth.”

Wrong again.

All values WITHIN a grid cell are mathematically interpolations.
second, EMPTY GRID CELLS assume the value of the whole GLOBE

Turbulent Eddie and David Wojick, you state some good reasons for skepticism about the BEST output. However, the terse statement by Alan Longhurst, the featured writer, is clearly inadequate. I hope that he will stop by and clarify his summary dismissal.

Alan Langhurst made two assertions that I think are likely to withstand attempts at detailed rebuttals. (1) because of variations in local conditions (e.g. altitude, ocean currents, upwelling), changes in the global mean temperature can not be taken as accurate indications of changes in heat flows through the atmosphere; (2) because of the well-documented problems with the land temperature records (inadequate sampling plan, changes in the land use near thermometers, changes and failures in the thermometers), even accurate reconstructions (or estimates) of the changes in global and regional mean land temperature trends are not likely to be achieved.

As to (2) the BEST team have addressed the problems in great detail, and have provided estimates of the imprecisions of their estimates. If someone can do a better job than BEST has done, with extant thermometer data, it is about time for them to do so.

” (2) because of the well-documented problems with the land temperature records (inadequate sampling plan, changes in the land use near thermometers, changes and failures in the thermometers), even accurate reconstructions (or estimates) of the changes in global and regional mean land temperature trends are not likely to be achieved.”

A. the problems are not well documented.
B.) The sampling is FINE if anything its over sampled. That is
why you can for example pick 110 PRISTINE sites in the US
(CRN) and predict the rest of the country: Including
100s of other pristine sites ( RCRN) and 1000’s of “bad” sites.
What’s it tell you when you can start with 60 samples and get
one time series… then add 300 and get the same,,, then add
3000 and get the same…. then add 30000 and get the same?
whats that tell you about sampling?
Whats it tell you when you can pick 5000 and then predict any
other 5000 or 10000?
SAMPLING more just changes the local DETAIL but in terms
of global average.. sampling is fine as it is.
C) land changes. the most significant land changes have been investigated. No effect on the global number. Again, changes local detail.
D) changes in thermometers.. You are unaware of the side by side studies.
E) Accuracy is a vague term. Accurate for What purpose. It’s accurate enough to say that those who deny that its warmed since the LIA
are wrong. Plus you can test the accuracy. just hold out data.
go ahead..

“Precisely.
######################
So you admit to doing a dodgy comparison

BEST, and probably even UDEL, lack sufficient resolution.

FOR WHAT? resolution is USE specific. If we did .25 degrees
you would bitch about that.
how about 1km? Look at Prism. Doing 1km is easy BUT
the question is this ‘is the local detail now FALSE”

See the little blue spots in UDEL?
And also, see the little red spots in UDEL?
I think they’re real, but not represented in BEST.

Why do you think they are real? from a theromodynamic standpoint
they dont make sense. Further 1km surface data from satellite
DONT show this.

Would seem to me that to get every station equal representation,
the resolution should be about the same as the distance separating the two closest stations.

Wrong.

Now, UDEL makes some crazy estimates for Antarctica, which are completely unjustified (not even BEST fabricates there).

fabricates? you have the data as recorded. You have a method.
the method produces an estimate. as we say in our paper the south pole is likely to have larger errors. the field will never match the observations.. the biggest differences show up in areas that stress the regressions. as always

And BEST, UDEL, and GISTEMP make gross errors smoothing over discontinuous areas ( e.g. estimates for 3km higher terrain elevation areas over Greenland ) and over far too far distances from stations ( South America, Africa, Antarctica, Greenland ). In that regard, HadCRUT is the only honest broker, using the “I don’t know” missing data.

WRONG: missing data is not I dont know. Missing data is mathematically the same as the average of the whole globe
in independent tests CRUTEMP is the worst.

BEST is not the worst, and may even be good, but it’s in no way the ‘best’ – keep trying.

Not the best implies you know of a better one. cite it.
and the independent methodological test that shows the method
is the best.

Steven Mosher: WRONG: missing data is not I dont know. Missing data is mathematically the same as the average of the whole globe
in independent tests CRUTEMP is the worst.

Missing data is “I don’t know”.

Assigning some computed values to serve in place of the missing data is called “imputation”, or sometimes “augmentation”. If your algorithm is assigning the global mean to missing values, then that is a mistake. It should be using one of the many “multiple imputation” methods.

turbulent eddie: BEST is not the worst, and may even be good, but it’s in no way the ‘best’ – keep trying.Is there something demonstrably better for handling the extant surface thermometer data?

Berkley is somewhat to blame for the cutesy name, cutesy names which Mosher seems not to like in the chapter title of the book.

So BEST begs the question of what the comparison is to.
Is it a comparison with other analyses?
or with the best we can do?
And how does one compare with either because ‘analyses’ are by definition spatial models for areas for which there are no observations.

If you examine the land areas of the five different analyses in the graphic, all five have significant variance.

Mosher admits BEST is not best because it lacks the resolution of UDEL.

My subjective analysis is that UDEL is better than BEST for continental analysis excluding the areas of poor coverage ( hundreds of kilometers from the nearest observation ). I write this specifically because of the small scale features which appear with the finer resolution ( 1/2 degree ) of the UDEL. BEST is nice and smooth, but the real atmosphere has lots of discrete and discontinuous processes which make trends rough and dirty as opposed to clean and slick.

Mathew
My comment concerning the BEST data was based on several issues:
1 – the integration of short fragments of observational data into the archive.
2 – the publication of the account of the new archive in the early issues of two of 54 (I think it was) new journals that were announced simultaneously and for which at least the first announcement left peer review as an option to editors.
3 – the reported failure of the data to detect a UHI effect.
I decided that I had more important things to do than dig into this initiative, is all.
Alan

As demonstrated well by TE’s plots posted above, the strongest century-scale warming is well away from anywhere you would expect a UHI effect. The UHI argument is in contradiction to the facts and very few people still make it.

My comment concerning the BEST data was based on several issues:
1 – the integration of short fragments of observational data into the archive.
#################################################
A) the archive aims at completeness. Showing ALL the data without
ANY ad hoc decisions about what is LONG ENOUGH.
B) The method was proved out with GHCN-M which selects
an ARBITRARY selection criteria for “long record” CRU
also selects an arbitrary long record criteria.
C) The inclusion of short records (define short ) does NOTHING
to the global average. It gives you better local detail.
D) Short records tend not to be effected by changes in TOBS or
station moves or instrument changes.
E) the decision to throw out short records is a decision that must
be tested. Everyone assumes long records are more reliable
F) the decision to only use long records is a requirement of
GISS and CRU untested methods
G. The basis for using short records is actually an approach devised
by skeptics.

2 – the publication of the account of the new archive in the early issues of two of 54 (I think it was) new journals that were announced simultaneously and for which at least the first announcement left peer review as an option to editors.

All papers were peer reviewed. theinsinuation that they were not
is beneath the author.

3 – the reported failure of the data to detect a UHI effect.
I decided that I had more important things to do than dig into this initiative, is all.

A) UHI effects ARE DETECTED and they are adjusted for.
B) The SIZE of the overall effect on a global basis is SMALL after adjustments.
C) The small effect is consistent with ALL other studies, so the author is illogical. he did not ignore other work because of its failure to detect UHI

Finally, I critcize the author for the misleading statements he made about others, not for his failure to stay CURRENT with the research

a sample UHI correction, The author didnt take time to examine the data.

The point of chapter 4 seems to be that the surface statistical models are unreliable. If so then I agree strongly. The satellites are the proper estimating measure of global temperatures. They show no warming 1978-1997 and 2001-2014. No evidence of GHG warming whatever.

Longhurst makes the mistake of looking at individual station data, comparing nearby stations, regional data, corrections to station data, and even starts comparing various datasets. Anybody doing this becomes sincerely disillusioned after a short time. They start shaking their heads and muttering “What a mess, what a mess …”. I’ve witnessed it here at CE and elsewhere. This is work is better left to unfeeling algorithms.

As an ever humble tech-tard, I have no means to directly assess the validity of this comment. In most matters of scientific controversy, I have to go at things indirectly, often by trying to weigh a person’s biases and by applying what I consider a decent amount of social intelligence. Perhaps the most important factor to be weighed is whether or not I respect a person, based on history and past observations. So for example when Judith makes an assertion, I tend to assume she knows whereof she speaks. In other words I trust her…

I respect Mosher too, and trust him, thus I start out with a fair amount of confidence that his comment above is in his view anyway, wholly defensible. What I find myself noting however is he’s left out the rest of the book. He doesn’t say, “well chapter 4 is pitiful, but on the whole the book has much to recommend it,” which I assume it must based on Judith’s post.

Steven Mosher: I will put it this way
anyone who titles the chapter “Can we measure global temperature?” has already lost.

The title is only a title, not the whole essay. Whatever you want to call the process, the result does not have sufficient accuracy to the purpose of estimating changes in heat flows on the order of the changes expected to be induced by doubling CO2.

“The title is only a title, not the whole essay. Whatever you want to call the process, the result does not have sufficient accuracy to the purpose of estimating changes in heat flows on the order of the changes expected to be induced by doubling CO2.”

here again with the special pleading for the tour de farce.

NOBODY is trying to estimate heat flows by constructing an INDEX of temperatures. NOBODY.

Further doubling c02 says nothing about heat flows.

IF he wanted to have a chapter about heat flows he should have written one.

The climate is a complex system. with any complex system you can create a DIAGNOSTIC metric. A metric that doesnt capture all of the system but rather just one slice. And then you track that metric as
an INDICATOR of total system change.

these indicators are NOT the sum total of the system.

the best indicator is OHC. but there we have a short record. so if your goal is understanding — as opposed to arm chair skepticism– you work with what you have and caveat as required.

Steven Mosher: NOBODY is trying to estimate heat flows by constructing an INDEX of temperatures. NOBODY.

what this is all about is trying to estimate the effects of additional CO2 in the atmosphere, which might impart an additional 4 W/m^2 of energy flow to the surface, with warming effects and effects on rainfall all over the place. recent attempts to estimate other heat flows include attempts to model the “pause” by measuring the change in the heat flows of the thermohaline circulation — a paper that was published earlier this year and discussed here. — and changes in heat flows into the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and from the Western Pacific to the Indian ocean, and from the ocean surfaces to the atmosphere via cyclonic storms.

You need to comment less and read more. I appears that on this topic you are totally ignorant.

Some basic logic.
when we estimate temperatures we are not trying to estimate heat flows.
Nobody who estimates temperatures is trying to do that. nobody.
So his critcism that we dont do what he wants us to do, and what others are doing is kinda silly.

How about his claim that thousands of stations are adusted by hand?
What did he say about cowtan and Way?
did you notice and other flaws? I bet not.. awesome critical reading skills
bro, just awesome.

I suppose that if he suggests that all this measurement and calibration is without meaning Mosher would have to say that (Mosher’s work) is without meaning. Mosher would have to, in kind say that the authors work is also meaningless.Ahh life without meaning that could create a pathology.

(3) Use your background knowledge to predict the rhetorical function of the chapter.

***

In our case, this should lead you to this:

It is also clear from these plots that the iconic temperature curve for the entire globe discussed at the beginning of this chapter conceals the existence of regional differences that are very significant. It should also be noted that the progression of warming in the surface temperature data in the GHCN departs significantly from the change in the troposphere, obtained from satellite MSU sensors and discussed in Chapter 4. Even though these data for the troposphere are available only since the 1970s, they must be the best indicator of the real radiative effect of CO2 in the atmosphere but, despite this, they are seldom discussed in analyses of changing global temperatures.

(I removed the “!” and the extraneous spacing to get this quote.)

This quote should tell you all there is to know about that chapter in ten seconds top. You can use the workhorse method outlined above to confirm your hypothesis. Such confirmation is required when dealing with unmastered writing.

In this case starting with 4.1:
“The term ‘global mean temperature’ has no formal meaning, and I have found
no clear definition of it: IPCC4 simply introduces it as the “global mean temperature
over ocean and land surfaces”.”
…

:Together, these are used as the principal indicator (as the GSMT) of the progress of anthropogenic global climate warming;
unfortunately, these measures are incompatible, even if they are all we have. ”

…..

“The authors note that “It is possible that the models are correct and that both
SSU data sets are in error” despite the fact that, as they point out, most models suggest
that increasing greenhouse gases accelerate circulation in the stratosphere and that
this should decrease ozone levels and hence induce cooling at low latitudes – as is
confirmed by observation.”
…
“The authors leave the matter there, with some
suggestions for resolving the impasse.”

mcintyre calls me one day and asks ‘what is the mail where gavin talks about the founding of RC”
moshpit: search for the word megaphone. its the only mail with that word
Bishop calls me… similar question
moshpit: search for the phrase “squeaky clean”

I will say that with age it is deteriorating greatly. I used to be able to recall page numbers and paragraphs from a lot of old books, book locations in the stacks… card locations in the old library drawers…
funny story… first philosophy class I was asked what was socrates argument for the immortality of the soul.

I got an F.

I reproduced the dialog roughly from memory.

Professor Earle said “I said give me his argument I meant in your own words’

but its not what it used to be.. Speed reading has also dropped off tremendously, but still really fast.. I like your method above.

Took a while to read the book, could do with a spelling checker and the inclusion of the missing diagrams.
I have got to say that I rather enjoyed chapter 4 though.

If it’s permissible to ask a question re an averaging temperature problem not mentioned by Longhurst : If photon emissivity is related to Temperature (kelvin) to the power of 4, why are we not measuring the average of Temperature (kelvin) to the power of 4 ? Also it means that interpolations into unmeasured regions cannot work, you would be missing the extremes which matter the most in a power 4 relationship. Surely the planetary extremes -90c to to +94c must make that power 4 significant.

I now realise that this is your area of expertise and I always knew I was and am a novice here but would appreciate a more detailed answer than your opening post (which may be completely apposite from your perspective).

First you have to understand what the global temperature average is and is not.

It is not an average of temperature, the physical property temperature.

It is an INDEX. its an index because it combines two measures (SAT and SST ) which measure different things.

Second, its not really an average, rather its an estimation of what you would see if you sampled the unsampled areas.

Third, you dont take the 4th power because you are predicting the following

You are predicting what you would read on a thermometer.

Go that?

lets look at your back yard pool. you stick a thermometer in it.
it reads 75F

You then make a prediction.
Stick a thermometer anywhere in my pool and my best estimate is that
it will read 75F. 4th power aint got anything to do with this prediction.

Stick a second thermometer in your pool. It reads 80F ( neighbor kid in the pool is smiling ) Now make your estimate..

One method is to simply average these two things and say
I guess 77.5 F And to call this “the average” but what you are actually claiming is the following:

If you stick a third thermomter in the pool I bet that 77.5 will be the reading

THAT is what folks are doing when they average temperatures. TECHNICALLY we are saying….
IF you place a thermometer at a random location, and know nothing else about that location then the best estimate (smallest error ) of what you will READ ON THAT THERMOMETER is 77.5F ( for example )

you wrote
“Also it means that interpolations into unmeasured regions cannot work, you would be missing the extremes which matter the most in a power 4 relationship. ”

After a quick scan, I like the caution Dr. Alan Longhurst communicates.

While I am personally convinced AGW confidence is exaggerated, as is the scientific community’s understanding of Earth’s heat source – the Sun – Dr. Longhurst patiently suggests that the debate should continue because the IPCC’s conclusions concern topics that have not yet been properly addressed.

While I am aware that the general opinion of the relevent scientific community is that no further debate is necessary after five successive assessments by the IPCC, I suggest that this is premature because these conclusions concern topics that have not yet been properly addressed by that body, and so should be accorded status in a continuing debate concerning the influence of anthropogenic effects on regional climates:

“Data from 86 detailed Zooplankton profiles taken during the EASTROPAC cruises of 1967 to 1968 have enabled a first-order description to be made of Zooplankton distribution in the upper 1000 m of the water column in relation to density, light, oxygen, and phytoplankton. A layer of abundant epiplankton contains a subsurface maximum that tends to coincide with the bottom of the mixed layer and with the depth of maximum carbon fixation, but lies above the chlorophyll-a maximum. Zooplankton abundance declines sharply downwards across the pycnocline, forming a discontinuity between the epiplankton and the low-biomass plankton below. Coincident with the deep sonic scattering layers are diurnal layers of migrant interzonal species which rise at night into the epiplankton. Major regional differences are caused by the shoaling of the pycnocline at the equatorial divergence, and the very deep pycnocline of the southern gyral region. An hypothesis, based upon the EASTROPAC data, is stated: that the form of phytoplankton profiles, in periods or regions of stable production, may be primarily determined by a depth-differential in herbivore grazing pressure, rather than by differential cell-sinking rates as is suggested in classical production models.”

Steven
My methods are described in Deep-Sea Research 23, 729-74 of 1976. I obtained profiles of zooplankton to 500m, the samples being partitioned at 10m intervals down the profiles, with accompanying physical data. Optical and chlorophyll data were obtained with near-simultaneous equipment by my colleagues, In this case, 86 profiles in the eastern Pacific gave me a good coverage for an analysis of how production and consumption of organic material in this region works. I used the same technique in the North Atlantic, the Arctic Ocean, the Barets Sea and the California Current. I’m sorry I cant send pdfs – I have only paper copies of all the publications that came out of this work.
Alan

When the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine they have their shortcomings, are frequently highly expensive and take up a lot of space in proportion to their output

. Storage technology needs to be improved vastly before they become viable and even then it’s renewable horses for courses, solar is useless in britains climate with 1700 hours of sun but might be a good idea in Kimberley with 3700 hours.

Maybe some day, but not now. For now, use of fossil fuels has great utility, which is why (to answer your question) humans do it. Whether the CO2 has counterbalancing negative consequences is potentially (because of laboratory science) an important question, but the evidence for such negative consequences is slim to none (and in my opinion, less compelling every year.)

Do you get it? All over the world, people of almost all cultures and ethnicities derive value from burning fossil fuels. Getting equal value from alternitives is going to take decades more work.

Getting equal value from alternitives is going to take decades more work.

It’s going to take several decades to get there. The costs of renewable have already decreased substantially in the past decade. And if we can get a global agreement on emissions reduction, that will get the private markets to invest in R&D reducing the cost even further.

Whether the CO2 has counterbalancing negative consequences is potentially (because of laboratory science) an important question, but the evidence for such negative consequences is slim to none (and in my opinion, less compelling every year.)

Your opinion on the science is basically worthless. I hope you realize that.

Well explain it to me, Weazle. I would like to know why so many scientists and scientific organizations are saying AGW is a problem. If they aren’t making it up, why are there so many people involved on one side and hardly any on the other side? I have yet to hear a “skeptic” give an adequate answer to that question without wild speculation and don’t expect you to either.

All things being equal, you wouldn’t want to run the risk. But all things aren’t equal. So you choose the proven,very large, short and medium term benefits of using fossil fuel and take your chances with the unclear and unproven possible negative consequences.

Joseph…think of the entire planetary system, oceans and air. You are increasing co2 at the rate of about 1.5 ppm in air. Do you really think that the sun, the oceans, with 1000x the heat capacity of air, stochastic events, and the very design of the entire system do not overwhelm the influence of that small an amount? Have you ever asked yourself why humans and animals in general, exhale 100x more co2 than they inhale, and why plants grow best at 3-4 times the amount of co2 in the air than what we have now. Does it not seem logical that nature adapts simply by the controls on the system which are much much bigger than the what we are putting into the air. Do you wonder why warmer times were referred to, up until this recent generation of alarmist took control, as climate optimums. The true hockey sticks of the fossil fuel era are in global progress, number of people, life expectancy and personal GDP. I would venture to say, that without fossil fuels the progress man has made so you can even offer your opinion on a blog like this would not have been possible. Surely you understand that. So why would you want to stop the chance for others to have this? I hate to say it, its as if now that you have yours, you wont consider the implications of what you are implying by saying a creature that exhales 100x more co2 than it inhales, is part of nature, is artificially changing the dynamics, especially since co2 is perfectly natural to the system, one so large and magnificent in design, it easily adapts to the very tiny amount relative to the entire system, we put into it cheers

You are increasing co2 at the rate of about 1.5 ppm in air. Do you really think that the sun, the oceans, with 1000x the heat capacity of air, stochastic events, and the very design of the entire system do not overwhelm the influence of that small an amount?

Why do you say “small?” We have gone from 280 ppm to 400 ppm in less than a 150 years. When was the last time that happened in Earth’s history? When is the last time the temperature increased by .8C in such a short period of time? I don’t consider those “small” changes.

“When is the last time the temperature increased by .8C in such a short period of time?”

Nobody knows. Apparently we can’t even be sure about the last 18 years as witnessed by the re-jiggering of the data that is currently going on in an attempt to resolve/eliminate/explain the current warming hiatus.

It is hard enough getting modern instrumented measurements correct. Why would anybody have much confidence in historical proxy data?

The temp increase 1908 to 1941 was virtually the same duration and magnitude as the temp increase 1977 to 2005. The first was almost certainly “natural” and the second likely somewhat anthropogenic. So, Joseph, the answer is the last time it warmed naturally this fast was when my mom was a kid.

If the model is correct, then this scale of inundation would greatly damage or destroy cities along the entire North American eastern seaboard, including e.g. Boston, New York City, Miami, etc., and many other cities located near the Atlantic coast. (wiki, ibid)

Nobody has accused “science” of anything. Nobody has said “science” has come to wrong conclusions.

Many scientists in very recent times have avoided or minimised the constant swings in climate – big and small, cyclical and linear – which other scientists have long taken as a given.

The climatariat sins warily by omitting more than by committing. Wording helps. What was, till very recently, regarded as the actual climate is now called something like natural variation or internal something-or-other. It’s in a broom-cupboard or under the sink, if anyone wants it.

How could anyone come to a conclusion that science views the climate as stable when it’s science that has described the huge swings in past climate?

Science also accepted the existence of a Medieval Optimum, and a Little Ice Age. Until Mannomatic (Mannomaniacal) “scientists” tried to “get rid of it” and created the fraudulent hokey stick.

Leaving aside all your arm-waving strawl-man arguments, the tendency was very pronounced and evident in the early part of the century: to view “climate” for the last few thousand years as “a global stable state” except for anthropogenic influences.

Michael: Gee mm, sounds like you’re against the idea of scientists noting climate is not a “global stable state”.

I am not against it. But as I noted, all the estimates of the effect of doubling the CO2 concentration treat the climate system as being “forced” from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. If you know of an exception, please share it.

You are criticizing Dr Longhurst’s Preface, describing why he decided to write the book. Isn’t a bit premature on your part? This reflects more about you than than him; appears you are inclined to think preface predicts conclusions, that all scholars approach their work with unbridled bias.

Thank you for the clarification. Did you not though, question the criticisms of Michael? Criticisms directed at Dr Longhurst’s motivations for writing the book, rather than his actual work? I suppose we must accept that some scientists start research that is motivated toward a preconcieved conclusion, however don’t we (or shouldn’t we) expect a higher standard from scientists? It appears to me that Michael expects the opposite, that scientists are expected to reach conclusions compatible with their motivations.

Joseph: Longhurst might need to ponder on how he manages to perceive this rather odd perception.

All of the calculations of the effect of changing CO2 treat the climate as though the CO2 increase changes the climate from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. This has been much discussed here and elsewhere. I said “All”, but it really only means “All that I have read”, of which I shall cite only 2 here: Pierrehumbert, “Principles of Planetary Climate” and Randall “Atmosphere, Clouds, and Climate”. If you know of even one exception, please tell me about it.

“I became troubled by what seemed to be a preference to view the climate as a global stable state” – AL

There is a STABLE WELL BOUNDED CYCLE, but this is a cycle and not a stable state. It would be like saying an AC Electrical Circuit had a DC electrical voltage. Temperature goes up and down and back up and back down. it does not ride along the hockey stick handle and then turn up at the blade. Look at actual data.

There is a stable, well bounded cycle, there is not any kind of a stable state.

You don’t always (usually?) explicitly endorse other people’s analysis of the science climate change, but you seem to have with this one. That’s kind of interesting that this one, in particular, would stand out for you.

As such, I have a question from the very first page that I read. It says the following:

“…sceptical scientists – and there are some – generally keep their doubts to themselves”

Now I doubt that you’d give such a strong endorsement to an analysis that makes assertions without supporting evidence. So I’m wondering if you could provide evidence in support of the claim that “skeptical” scientists generally keep their doubts to themselves, and if you can’t, you could ask the author to provide that evidence?

The context in which much science, including environmental science, is performed today has clearly corrupted peer review towards supporting a socially-­‐acceptable interpretation of observations

Or perhaps it’s just laziness. No, on second thought, I suspect the majority of “peer review” comes from incompetent time-servers with no idea about the science they’re supposed to “review”. Except for pal-review, and its diametric opposite: enemy review. Those are usually competent, but agenda-driven.

Or perhaps it’s just laziness. No, on second thought, I suspect the majority of “peer review” comes from incompetent time-servers with no idea about the science they’re supposed to “review”. Except for pal-review, and its diametric opposite: enemy review. Those are usually competent, but agenda-driven.

I just started reading the section on numerical models and it is a jewel. The most interesting point is that those who “run the models” have higher confidence in the output model results than those who actually build the models. This struck a strong chord with me because it is so true in my field. We actually are trying to address this bias and there are some new papers coming out by big names (not me) about it. But I do have a paper on it in the works trying to do a rigorous job of evaluating uncertainty. Even for problems considered trivial, its much larger than the literature would indicate.

Of course in climate science, the problem is very bad. Political partisans and activist but ignorant scientists feel a strong need to defend the models despite deep ignorance. It’s a bad situation.

The data to prove CO2 has no effect on average global temperature already exists.

The relation between mathematics and the physical world mandates that, for a forcing to have an effect, it must exist for a period of time. The temperature changes with time in response to the net forcing. If the forcing varies, (or not) the effect is determined by the time-integral of the forcing (or the time-integral of a function thereof).

The atmospheric CO2 level has been above about 150 ppmv (necessary for evolution of life on land as we know it) for at least the entire Phanerozoic eon (the last 542 million or so years). If CO2 was a forcing, its effect on average global temperature (AGT) would be calculated according to its time-integral (or the time-integral of a function thereof) for at least 542 million years. Because there is no way for that calculation to consistently result in the current AGT, CO2 cannot be a forcing.

Dan, I’ve read your blog and recommended it to many who want to learn about another explanation for temperature trends. I would like to see you expand this into a full paper and publish it through a peer-reviewed journal.

I have also tried to use your scheme to model (fit) temperature trends. Your model appears to fit reasonably well back to 1850 or so. Before that I see the model breaks down because the number of sunspots was so low. Have you looked into the pre-1850 era at all?

Peer reviewed version of the work as it existed a couple years ago is published in Energy and Environment, vol. 25, No. 8, 1455-1471.

The paper at agwunveiled has graphs (created by my EXCEL model constructed as described in the method) back to the beginning of regularly recorded sunspot numbers (1610). The sustained period of low sunspot numbers coincides with the depths of the LIA. No world wide direct measurements of AGT exist that far back in time. The proxy estimates are consistent with the equation.

at least 70% of the variance in the annually smoothed detrended altimetry data can be explained as the combined effect of both the solar forcing and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The phase of the solar component can be used to derive the different steric and eustatic contributions. We find that the peak to peak radiative forcing associated with the solar cycle is 1.33 ± 0.34 W/m2, contributing a 4.4 ± 0.8 mm variation. The slow eustatic component (describing, for example, the cryosphere and large bodies of surface water) has a somewhat smaller peak to peak amplitude of 2.4 ± 0.6 mm. Its phase implies that warming the oceans increases the ocean water loss rate. Additional much smaller terms include a steric feedback term and a fast eustatic term. The ENSO contributes a peak to peak variation of 5.5 ± 0.8 mm, predominantly through a direct effect on the MSL and significantly less so indirectly through variations in the radiative forcing. . . .
If the linear trend is removed, the two drivers explain more than 70% of the variance of the annually smoothed (with a 1 year moving average) and linearly detrended data. . . .
The eustatic solar term was found to be about half as large as the steric solar term. Interestingly, its sign implies that a higher ocean temperature gives rise to a higher rate of water leaving the ocean basins and getting trapped on land, thus lowering the sea level. This is opposite from the long-term expectation, where warmer oceans should cause the melting of the cryosphere and a rise in sea level. . . .
Just the variations in the total solar irradiance correspond to a radiative forcing of 0.17–0.24 W/m2, but the amount of heat entering the ocean over the solar cycle appears to be much larger.

Interestingly, its sign implies that a higher ocean temperature gives rise to a higher rate of water leaving the ocean basins and getting trapped on land, thus lowering the sea level.

Warmer oceans are covered with less sea ice and produce more snowfall. Colder oceans are covered with more sea ice and produce less snowfall.
This is why temperature and sea level have been bounded. The values have changed over the past 50 million years toward a cooler world because the ocean levels and currents changed to circulate more warm tropical water into Polar Oceans and that melted more sea ice and supported more snowfall. There is a natural ice machine in the Arctic and in the Antarctic that do regulate the temperature in each hemisphere. If you add heat, from any source, solar cycles, orbit cycles, greenhouse gas, you can make a difference for awhile, but that will warm the oceans, remove sea ice and ramp up the snowfall rates. If you remove heat, by any method, you can make a difference for awhile, but that will cool the oceans, add sea ice and ramp down the snowfall rates. The thermostat set points are the temperature that Polar Oceans Freeze and Thaw. Look at the past data. it has always cycled up and down. Over the past 50 million years the temperature has cooled but during that cooling the warm cold warm cold cycle was always in the data. The circulation of more warm water in Polar Oceans does turn the ice machines up. The sea ice freezes and thaws to keep the temperature regulated. This cycle is very robust.

ALL THE CONFUSION ABOUT THE PHONY GLOBAL WARMING, was created long, long time ago. Failed geologist, that were not able to get themselves job in the mining industry did it, it wasn’t the butler who did it…!
Example #1: all extinctions were pinned on global warmings / coolings and comets hitting the earth. The truth: most viruses are smart and leave 10-60% of the host alive, so that the virus can survive, BUT: some viruses were stupid – easy to spread, were killing every host – wasn’t any immunisation invented => host left only fossilized bones to be found, virus extinct; or other animals invented immunity for it and the virus survived – probably now that virus is harmless nuisance as flue virus or similar. But for shionks that; every summer is global warming / every winter global cooling; is handy to blame the ”global” temperature for every extinction…?!

Example #2: alluvial deposits in Colorado canyon are as pages in a book; can tell the past very accurately: bigger gravel deposit = it was more rain – only fine dirt deposits are proof of not much rain, BUT: that doesn’t say even for Colorado state – it only tells about the rainfall of upstream the river catchment, full stop – definitely not about the whole planet!!! b] maybe was a wet year, OR: on 29 of February was lots of rain, rain melted the snow and the water from both created very big flood, then for the rest of the year was dry / no rain… for the shonks that’s irrelevant…?! c] then another shonky geologist finds same imprint in Mongolia, just a coincident – if it wasn’t exactly – he forced it to fit (same as you forcing your sock on a horse’s foot, for money and publicity, you can do it) That double proof cements the knowledge, goes in education books, it’s final proof… The question is: –”if there isn’t SAME imprints on all the other lands between Colorado and Mongolia, were all those lands on another planet at that time?”! That question was never asked, why not? a] more rain doesn’t mean ”warmer year” b] simultaneously floods and droughts happens on many places, all the time, the planet is a big place!

Example #3: most important: the official North Poll was on different places in the past – when North Poll was for example on Iceland, or west Canada-> some temperate lands now, was tropics / some today’s tropics were in cold climate. Milutin Milankovich was the only correct in his theory, nobody else! But: for the last 150y they found tropical imprint in cold climate; they declared it as ”the planet was much warmer” OR: when they found imprint of cold climate somewhere in the tropics; was declared as ” snowball earth” top stupidity! Now the western democracies are paying for that stupidity, and even democracy will be lost… because of ”established Pagan beliefs”…

Example #4: in a cave the shonk vandalizes the best stalagmite; cuts it and analyses the rings of calcium: thicker ring for him represents wetter year, WOW! It’s thicker ring because a herbivore animal drops something above, in the poo from the grass is ”extra calcium’‘ – another time a snail died above – from snail’s shell the calcium leached down and made bigger ring on that stalagmite; but that was declared instead as:7200 years ago was warmer by 2C, the WHOLE planet! One dead snail increased the temp on the whole planet, from Africa to Antarctic… reason: because somebody didn’t get into that cave and braked the shonk’s arm, for vandalizing the beautiful stalagmite, BECAUSE: if that stalagmite was able to tell the temp above on the surface -wouldn’t be 30 ALL different shapes and sizes stalagmites in 10m radius in the cave! Was it 30 different climates simultaneously in the 10m radius above the cave, so every stalagmite is different; YOU tell me!

Good idea. Wish more postwrs woild follow it. I just spent several hours speed reading the whole book (not checking references, and such. Just topical thematic.). Much to come back to for deeper checking. Stuff he found that I had not, especially on the Arctic, oceans, and marine biology. That I missed freshwater river flows into the Arctic Ocean, and the resulting salinity and cyclic ice impacts, is just embarassing. But very enlightening about that part of a ‘wicked’ problem. Live and learn. Like about CET.

One might say the same for the ipcc reports.
But a better approach is to read the parts where you have the deepest understanding.
I will say that there is nothing new or worthwhile in the treatment of land surface data.
You know that
Every reader of wuwt, CA and judithcurry.com knows that.

I assume we are all talking about Kimberley In south Africa and not the one in Canada.

I think the early data is largely anecdotal. Kimberley was at the centre of the boer wars at the turn of the century and Of the disturbances that continued for Years afterwards. Just like the mariners on board ships in world war two who didn’t take SST’s for obvious reasons, I doubt that much accurate reporting of temperatures went on for much of the early
Period.

Although Kimberley was a large town in 1900′, hence it’s importance to the British, it is now some 7 times larger at approaching a quarter of a million people. Is there a uhi allowance in the data?

Also I think the station has moved a Fair number of times in the intervening period. Kimberley is at a high altitude and any of the station moves could compromise the data if it went higher or lower up the hills.

What makes you believe that your numerical data in this instance is any better than the anecdotal stuff that my monks might produce?

> I assume we are all talking about Kimberley In south Africa and not the one in Canada.The Moshpit’s link leads to Kimberley, South Africa, TonyB.

You don’t need to assume we’re talking about that town, since it’s in the text:

One of the strangest examples that I have found is for Kimberley, South Africa, which in 2011 was presented on the GISS Station Selector site as a long, unbroken data series from about 1890 to the present time.

That’s on page 87. before Andy’s “individually and largely by hand” underlined innuendo.

SM, to repeat, he does not say what you have now wrongly claimed twice. On page 83, he is quoting the NASA GISS step one of quality control. A quote in italics. Take your beef to Gavin Schmidt if you don’t like how Hansen set up his fudge factory.

It seems clear that what is presented in the current data sets has resulted from a multitude of individual decisions, big or trivial, made by the technicians responsible for adjusting the data; the complexity and magnitude of adjusting, individually and largely by hand, several thousand data sets surely requires that a careful record must be kept and made widely known.

Page 87.

With the Author’s own emphasis.

***

There are 51 hits for “adjust” in the document. Professor Zipf might find it odd. Should I quote some?

Willard, for the record I understand your point his wording/misunderstanding statement on page 87 of a what? 237 page free book that has other understandable minor problems. Heck,my ebook publisher made bigger mistakes in all 3. So did I.
Tell me, is his citation of NASA GISS on page 83, which I have now cited twice, correct? For if so, therein lies his IMO minor misunderstanding. Hardly grounds to reject everything else.
BTW, re the general topic, check out my essay When Data Isn’t. A less scholarly, more vividly illustrated explanation reaching the same conclusions differently. And especially check out technical footnote 24. The BEST station 166900 example, plus a lot more. A modeled temperature field expectation IS NOT an observed temperature datum.

I could go on. See for example the recent WUWT guest post using SurfaceStations.org classifications to demonstrate the hash GISS homogenization makes of pristine CRN 1 suburban and rural stations in USHCN.
A couple of suggestions. 1. I am not a sir, so stop the slur. 2. Try bringing some actual own study of the data and science, rather than an ankle biting echo of SM, to the conversation. On any such analyses, I would willingly research independently and engage with you. Please evidence some ability to do so? So far, you have woefully not AFAIR.

> I understand your point his wording/misunderstanding statement on page 87 of a what?

I’m not sure I understand your question, Sir.

Perhaps there’s no need to clarify it, since the matter is quite simple. You opined twice about what Alan “does not say” and I showed twice what Alan does indeed say. Before minimizing what Alan does indeed say, it might be nice if you could acknowledge what Alan did indeed say.

***

Since you mention that Alan gave his review for free, may I ask you why don’t you do the same with your ebooks? It’s not as if you really needed the money.

I think rud owes me an apology. Kidding.
Look there are issues with adjustments.
Rud and Brandon have done good work.
Neither of them made the stupid mistake of saying that the adjustments are done by hand.
The book was described as a tour DE force.
Now people are special pleading for work that is inferior to their own.

“Also I think the station has moved a Fair number of times in the intervening period. Kimberley is at a high altitude and any of the station moves could compromise the data if it went higher or lower up the hills.”

That’s detectable if the change is large enough. One reason why you
cannot rely on metadata alone.

I wonder how much you would doubt the records if they were a part of CET.

As I have said before, I doubt the precision of all historical temperature records. CET is better than most as it has been so thoroughly examined and can be constrained and verified in its ‘generality’ by crop records and anecdotal accounts.

Kimberley is rather more suspect for a variety of reasons of which altitude/station move is just one.

You need to raise your numerical data above the levels of ‘anecdotal’ just as you ask me to do with the text version

‘It seems clear that what is presented in the current data sets has
resulted from a multitude of individual decisions, big or trivial, made
by the technicians responsible for adjusting the data; the complexity
and magnitude of adjusting, individually and largely by hand, several
thousand data sets surely requires that a careful record must be kept
and made widely known.’

In the original version (although not in this copy and pasted version above) the words ‘individually and largely by hand’ is underlined. Whether the precise meaning of that is qualified elsewhere I don’t know as I have been too busy chasing a flock of Willard’s squirrels to read too much more.

However on first and second read I would take it to mean that the technicians have carefully looked at the data and-for whatever reasons- have decided to adjust it manually in a rather painstaking and deliberate process.

where individual scrutiny comes in is selecting which observations/stations to include; even if this is ‘automated’, the automated rules were based on scrutiny of situations surrounding individual observations/stations.

Berkeley Earth is apparently totally automated in this regard; the other analyses are not, to my knowledge.

I do not know what that refers to so let me restate. You ought to spell my name correctly.

The treatment of BEST is clearly inadequate.

Alan Langhurst made two assertions that I think are likely to withstand attempts at detailed rebuttals. (1) because of variations in local conditions (e.g. altitude, ocean currents, upwelling), changes in the global mean temperature can not be taken as accurate indications of changes in heat flows through the atmosphere; (2) because of the well-documented problems with the land temperature records (inadequate sampling plan, changes in the land use near thermometers, changes and failures in the thermometers), even accurate reconstructions (or estimates) of the changes in global and regional mean land temperature trends are not likely to be achieved.

As to (2) the BEST team have addressed the problems in great detail, and have provided estimates of the imprecisions of their estimates. If someone can do a better job than BEST has done, with extant thermometer data, it is about time for them to do so.

I may not have said it yet in this thread, but I think that BEST is unlikely to be improved upon.

the consensus theory is that a doubling of CO2 concentration will change energy flows sufficiently to increase surface temperatures by a small amount, less than 1% of baseline temperature from a small change in the rate of outgoing LWIR. Given what we now know about a bunch of the heat transfer processes, and their nonlinearities, their natural variations, and given the likelihood that there is much more for us to learn, it is not likely that an achievably accurate reconstruction of the past land surface temperature record will be useful in estimating any of the relevant changes in the energy flows.

ClimateReason: However on first and second read I would take it to mean that the technicians have carefully looked at the data and-for whatever reasons- have decided to adjust it manually in a rather painstaking and deliberate process.

Furthermore, he is not describing BEST, which he summarily dismisses.

Peter O’Neill has helpfully supplied us with portions of the computer code. I would call rewriting code on a station-by-station basis, and judging the results by a process that includes eyeballing, as “manually”, even though the process is thereby automated for subsequent runs.

Here is the beautiful thing.
If you look at individual stations you are accused of
Having your thumb on the scale.
If you use a hands off approach you are then
Accused of not paying attention to details.
Further folks demand that you speak for the algorithm and explain in every case what it did and why.

Now if you look at cases where your algorithm screwed up.. And fix the code you are again accused of man handling data.

I would call rewriting code on a station-by-station basis, and judging the results by a process that includes eyeballing, as “manually”, even though the process is thereby automated for subsequent runs.

####$$$$

Generally you don’t do that.
You find one station done poorly.. U find out the reason and fix the code.

Example. A user pointed out a buggy station.
We fixed the code. 600 stations were effected.

Yes, that I quoted the very same passage on p. 87, TonyB. Twice already. The one that includes the words individually and largely by hand. Including right in the very subthread you’re commenting right now.

***

> I have been too busy chasing a flock of Willard’s squirrels to read too much more.

First, it’s “I was asleep” and it’s “I was busy”. Not just busy: busy chasing squirrels when all I did was to quote the two damn documents under discussion.

You appear to have a very poor understanding of that concept, TonyB. Playing squirrels is a way to introduce extraneous informations to evade a particular commitment.

To take a recent example not far from here, your whole comment to JCH is a big fat squirrel. You claimed that Calendar’s conjecture has been “elegantly refuted here by Giles Slocum in 1955”. When you read the conclusion to Slocum 1955, we see that this claim is false. Now, instead of acknowledging this, you went from “read harder” to doubling down with “Slocum considered it was refuted” (a fantastic claim to make when facing a quote where Slocum says exactly that it was not!) to “but the scientific establishment” and now to “but the met office”.

While you threw all these squirrels around, I simply kept repeating that your claim that Calendar’s conjecture has been elegantly refuted by Slocum 1955 is false.

And that notwithstanding all the “sorry I can’t hear you” and other kinds of passive resistance, like “you’re playing games while I’m a very serious person,” paraphrasing of course your cheap ad hom.

***

> [S]urely I was agreeing with you about the changing by hand?

The best way to agree with what has been quoted earlier would have been to say “I agree with was has been quoted earlier” and then point to it. To quote it again like it’s some kind of discovery does not sound like the agreement speech act.

If you want to agree with something relevant, try to acknowledge that the Moshpit linked to the correct Kimberley station, contrary to what you implied earlier. That, at least, won’t be squirrel territory.

I agreed with you and mosh against rud about the ‘by hand’ item. How on earth does that warrant ‘go team!’

I never at any time said that mosh did not link to the correct Kimberley. What sort of new diversion is this?. I commented that the data for Kimberley was likely compromised for the reasons I stated.

I merely said that I assumed we were talking about the south African version because after reading chapter 4 I spent some time researching Kimberly and came across quite a few Canadian references. Consequently I wasn’t 100 per cent certain we were discussing The south African one and had no intention of going back in again to read the chapter as it took a long time to download and then locate the right place.so to ensure we were all talking about the same place I made a passing comment.

Please cite the cheap ad Homs. I can’t see any. You read way too much into the simplest comment.

Willard likes to pretend he is Bertrand Russell’s squirrel. But he really is just a wild and crazy one running about with no sense of direction. For him, pointless but detailed and superficial analyses are the nuts he lives off during the winter.

If any of the denizens has the slightest interest in this increasingly surreal sub thread they can read the words of both of us and make up their own minds, that is of course if they have the faintest idea as to what it is all about.

I’m replying to the initial “Kimberley” comment, since replying to one of the later comments in the thread may make less sense.

First, Kimberley is not an example of (page 83)

1 – Elimination of dubious records is done by finding “unphysical-
looking segments…eliminated after manual inspection” and by comparison
with nearby stations.

The reason early years are dropped by Gistemp can be found in the comments of PArars.f, in the STEP2 FORTRAN code:

C**** The homogeneity adjustment parameters
C**** =====================================
C**** To minimize the impact of the natural local variability, only
C**** that part of the combined rural record is actually used that is
C**** supported by at least 3 stations, i.e. heads and tails of the
C**** record that are based on only 1 or 2 stations are dropped. The
C**** difference between that truncated combination and the non-rural
C**** record is found and the best linear fit and best fit by a broken
C**** line (with a variable “knee”) to that difference series are found.
C**** The parameters defining those 2 approximations are tabulated.

In the case of Kimberley the early years are dropped because they fail to provide at least 3 supporting rural stations. This can be seen in PApars.GHCN.CL.1000.20.log for the December 2014 data (my enhanced version has added some extra information here). The initial urban Kimberley record starts from 1897, but only two rural records start before 1959:

I have chosen to show the December 2014 run above simply because that was the month for which I had parameters already set, even though I have also run Gistemp for more recent months. The first year which is included in the adjusted Kimberley record varies from month to month. I have not yet checked, but I presume that the reason for this will be found on examination of the adjusted GHCN-M data which is used by Gistemp as input. I’ll add another comment here when I have checked that presumption.

PO, this is (IMO) an important contribution to how the official land records are calculated. In this case, the inherent bias would be toward showing UHI. Consistent with my own analyses elsewhere. And the opposite of what is claimed to be done.
I urge you to write this up as a stand alone guest post and submit to Judith. Few have delved into the actual Fortran code like you just did. A big deal.

I can write a guest post if needed, although probably not immediately – I’m on holiday in France until the weekend,travelling back to a car ferry with another change of city tomorrow.

I suggested “if needed” as most of the essential information on the reason for the loss of early Kimberley years is already contained in my comment above. I still need to look at Gistemp for a few other months to examine why the year adjusted data starts changes, and I’ll post a comment on that here. If that is as straightforward as I expect, a comment should suffice. If not I’ll write that guest post.

If there are other puzzles regarding Gistemp behaviour which i may be able to explain from the code, it might be worth then covering these as well as a guest post. My implementation of Gistemp provides considerable extra output and allows setting of breakpoints for the adjustment of a specified station, so, for example, I was able to watch the treatment of each rural station used to adjust Kimberley. My blog is linked from my name here, and any other puzzles I may be able to help with can be left as replies on my “About” page.

Having said that, with the adoption by GISS of adjusted GHCN-M data as input rather than the unadjusted GHCN-M v2 data used previously, I now tend to regard Gistemp as GHCN-M “Light” (and any Irish reader of a certain age will likely spot a parallel terminology with the introduction of Guinness “Light”, which was not an overwhelming success). Piling a further automated urban heating/cooling adjustment, using many stations wrongly identified as urban or rural on the basis of poor location metadata, on top of another automated GHCN Pairwise Homogenization adjustment which also has issues just does not seem wise. The addition of a small number of SCAR stations, and polar region interpolation issues, do not seem to me sufficient to justify the continued use of Gistemp. So I will if requested look at Gistemp puzzles, but I have concentrated my attention on GHCN-M more recently, as my blog will show, and I suggest that this is where you concentrate your attention too.

I referred to GHCN Pairwise Homogenization adjustment issues (and these probably also arise with USHCN, but I have not yet archived enough USHCN data). The adjustments made to past data show a lack of consistency from GHCN-M version to version, and even from one day to the next, beyond that which might be expected from a well behaved robust algorithm. Station relocations are presumably relatively rare events in the life of a station. The magnitude and frequency of changes to past values do not seem consistent with this. Plenty of examples can be seen in recent posts at my blog. For now I will just add two examples to this comment, Marseille (France, the first station I examined) and Sacaton (US, but GHCN not USHCN here).

To include a picture in a WordPress blog comment (such as here), put its URL alone on a line by itself: after the previous text, hit enter/return (on a Windoz keyboard), then paste in the URL of the picture, then (if you want to say more) hit enter/return again.

The URL has to end with “.jpg”, or a similar picture identifier. If your original URL has an ampersand followed by parameters after the “.jpg”, you need to strip those off, and then verify that the resulting URL actually calls up the picture you want to show.

(From some picture-oriented sites it doesn’t: they require the parameters to serve the picture. In that case, you’re SOL unless you want to save the picture out of your browser then re-upload it somewhere that will serve it in native form. I usually use Blogger: I have a draft post that I upload pictures to, then copy/paste the raw URL from the post into my browser’s URL field to verify the picture works.)

And since that worked, Marseille:
Both images should enlarge when clicked. Useful to knowthat there is this workaround for the failure prone WordPress “Insert image” icon. I’ve had the same problem before elsewhere as well. The “Preview” button shows the reply with the desired images, but they are lost on submission.

Additional comment on starting year. I’ll need to check the code for the exact rules used, but the adjusted record is allowed to start somewhat before the start of the combined rural record. The Kimberly adjusted record starts in December 1955, with 1956 as the first full year, while 1959 is the first year in which three or more rural station records overlap. I’ll post another comment when I have checked the code.

I’m just speaking for my own peanut gallery but I think we would all benefit from a guest post. When I read through your blog, not being a scientist, I found much of the material to be incomprehensible for the layperson. If you worked on a post that made your material more readily understandable to us novices it would surely be a fruitful endeavor and perhaps concentrate the essence of the material?

I’m just speaking for my own peanut gallery but I think we would all benefit from a guest post. When I read through your blog, not being a scientist, I found much of the material to be incomprehensible for the layperson. If you worked on a post that made your material more readily understandable to us novices it would surely be a fruitful endeavor and perhaps concentrate the essence of the material?

It does look like a guest post on Gistemp and GHCN-M adjustment would be useful. There have been a number of issues raised which I might be able to comment on, and now perhaps better in one post rather than scattered as a number of replies among nearly 300 so far in this post. I’ll start to build a post based on issues raised here.

As Kimberley has been discussed here, I will now add an image of the range of adjustments made to the Jan 1978 temperature value over recent years:
Jan 1978 lies within the usual 1951-1980 and 1961-1990 anomaly base periods, and other months within those base periods will have undergone similar changes. As the most recent temperature values are not adjusted, the most recent anomaly values will show changes reflecting the changing base period average. For v3.0.0 and v3.1.0 GHCN-M did not adjust Kimberley. From v3.2.0 on GHCN-M started to adjust Kimberley, and while seeming to vary less than those for Sacerton and Marseille posted earlier, these adjustments are hardly a model of consistency either. The subsequent Gistemp adjustments sometimes increase the adjustments made by GHCN-M, at other times decrease it. Borrowing a term from another context, it seems clear that GHCN-M, not Gistemp, is the main “forcing” for these adjustments.

I have seen a considerable increase in blog traffic, referred from judithcurry.com, but most visitors have browsed general posts rather than those related to Gistemp and GHCN-M.

A couple of days back we stood to have our first warm spring day here. Then the clouds rolled in, rather unseasonably for September.

It was a warm day, but we didn’t feel it, no did any thermometers. You see, as the old sixties song goes, clouds got in the way: clouds which hung about to give us a higher minimum than we might have had otherwise.

Never mind. If winds are more from the inland in our dry late winter/early spring months we can get heat, high fire risk and hard frost all in 24 hours, as often in the 90s. Then we really miss the clouds.

Thanks for the interesting discussion on data adjustments. I have a couple of questions for those of you who have dug deep into the data on this issue.

… What are the pluses and minuses of sat temps vs sfc thermometers ?
… Sat temps have risen more in the past 12 months but less in the last 35 years than sfc thermometers. Why are they different ? Is the difference error of measurement or can it be explained otherwise.?
… The USA started a pristine database in 2004. How does it compare to Giss, Hadcrut, Best, Uah, Rss? Have other countries set up similar surface networks?
… What is your estimate of error in our ability to est global temp index?
… If you were global climate czar with current funding levels, where would you spend more and where would you reduce funding?

I thought it was generally accepted that the winds that accelerate up through cumulus clouds is accelerated by the energy given out by condensation in the cloud itself. (I don’t think this energy is directly released as heat, instead it is efficiently converted to upward momentum by the “cloud pump”. But many insist this wind is caused by front interaction or by the warm low pressure air below pushing it up. However if we accept that the cloud IS causing the increase in speed of wind up through the cloud, there are 2 consequences. Newtons equal and opposite reactions, means that the cloud is being pushed lower a little bit and also there is a suck of the air below, up. I imagine it to be like a fleet of doughnut shaped airships, (with helicopter rotors in the “hole” floating at 30,000 ft. Now they all dive to 10, 000 ft. What do they do? they all turn on their rotors to push air up to make the airships go down. At 10,000 ft, the rotors are going and air is being pumped from under the airships to above. Air must come from elsewhere (some horizontally) to replace the air that they pump. What would the air pressure below the fleet be? And above? (I’m too tired to figure that out). I made a little video to show the analogy. I know clouds are not discrete “things” but there should still be an effect going on. Somehow they will be a bit lower “than they should be” , or pressures will be slightly “Wrong” in areas of intense cumulus cloud. (I think). Feel free to attack the idea, but don’t make it personal. Video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPO8dWm_GIg

Brian White: Evaporation means a change of state from liquid water to water vapour which has a molecular weight of 18 compared to a molecular weight of dry air of about 29. Convective movement of air result from moist air being lighter than dry air.

Frederick Colbourne. Condensation releases huge amounts of energy. Convection doesn’t stop at the cloud. It continues in and through the clouds. (sans the water vapor that initially drove the convection but which has just condensed) (the droplets are heavier than air) Heavier than air droplets are as you know influenced by gravity to go down. But the upward motion accelerates (in larger clouds) due to that energy release. The energy released is efficiently converted by the 2 phase gas/droplet flow in the cloud into upward motion of air, and an efficient drying process for that air. The air is being dried faster in the cloud than the air beside the cloud. So it can go up faster. Especially if rain develops.

Thank you for providing what appears to be a very informative read. I note the usual ankle biters go for the minutiae rather than reflecting on the overall. I’m breathlessly waiting on the certain to come slimeball personal attacks that are sure to titillate, something like when the author threw spitballs at his 5th grade teacher. The more of that stuff, the more I know the author is on to something.

Just like when I’ve looked up the background of many high profile skeptics, the author appears to have had an illustrious career, one that suggests to me an innate desire to be inquisitive. And one that many are aspiring to.

He notes that solar changes since the Maunder Minimum amount to 0.5 W/m2 and that CO2 effects already since then are three times as large. He does not note that future CO2 changes can be three times further multiplied, and why he still thinks solar effects are important in the context that they are ten times smaller. Climate is all about the forcing, but his forcing chapter is not about quantifying the GHGs relative to other effects. Elsewhere he seems to have dismissed or ignored the whole field of geological paleoclimate explanations for temperature variations on time scales up to the last billion years. He keeps saying things are ignored, and just ignores some very pertinent findings himself. Solar variations are small compared to GHGs, so they are not being ignored but treated in proportion to their importance to future climate change which is as a small player. Same with internal ocean variations.

Good to see a biologist with long, practical, and diverse experience weigh in on the topic. For too long climate science has been dominated by physicists who reduce everything to equations and lose some of the complexity of natural processes. Sure, physics is crucial, but we’re trying to understand a bio-chemo-geo-system.

I know it’s only a comment on a climate blog but it would be kind of nice if conflicts of interest were occasionally mentioned.
For instance Steven Mosher could mention, at the end of his comment about how pitiful Chapter 4 is, something along the lines of;
“The author of this comment is employed by Berkeley Earth, the product of which is described as “unacceptable” by the .author of the book, and therefore has a direct pecuniary interest in the topic.”

But of course scientists, amongst all the creatures of the earth, aren’t subject to such conflicts. That’s why they have their pals review their work.

Full disclosure;
I personally applied for a $500,000 grant from Exxon Mobil to make this comment but was turned down.

Given that tectonic and volcanic activity will be always with us, those who live beside the sea must accept that there may one day be a big price to pay for the economic benefits that accrue from this proximity. Should the caldera of the Cumbra Vieja volcano in the Canaries, sooner or later, collapse then western Europe will face major a devastation of its coastal regions facing the Atlantic.560

It’s interesting though to compare imagined risks and behaviors in different situations:

► we cannot do anything about the risk so we are sanguine about it like, Lindzen’s meteor strike;

► we could do something about the risk — like, not live close to the coast — but, we’d rather assume the risk; and,

► we pretend we can do something about the risk — like, stopping seas from rising by demonizing coal-fired power plants — when, neither the pretense nor behavior makes any sense.

A majority of peer-reviewed studies are flawed. Not much of a certification.

Any review of what we “know” about science which considers all published studies to be ‘certified’, is an attitude I don’t understand. As a matter of logic and rationality, I think that attitude is certifiable.

Yeah they should just write more books and avoid peer review all together.. Dr Curry likes this book, so that should be good enough for science. And if anyone else criticizes it, well they are just warmists taking pot shots from the peanut gallery.

Anyone who thinks studies are “certified” by the peer review process is insane. I don’t care if they write books, blog posts, or children’s fiction.

And this insanity goes way beyond this author. It infects the entire scientific establishment. This insanity is why science, as an institution, is completely untrustworthy.

Science has no credibility because it has no quality control. People who embrace crap, like the hockey stick, without ever giving a thought to checking it are reckless in the extreme. They should never be trusted.

Until science, as an institution, realizes that quality matters, why would you trust it? We currently have idiots relying on claims of findings in an abstract without the slightest clue if the study is any good. Any time someone assumes (without justification) that peer review is a guarantor of quality, that person’s opinions about science should not be trusted.

People who knowingly rely on crap to form opinions are stupid. Or insane. A rational public should steer clear. At least until some adults show up with enough maturity to understand what quality means.

This from my iPad which is not always the most cooperative of devices, from ‘about the author ‘

of Oceanography (1977-­‐79) and was Director-­‐ General of that Institute (1970-­‐86). He has published 80-­‐odd research papers and his most recent books are “Ecological Geography of the Sea” (Elsevier, 1998 & 2007) and “Mismanagement of Marine Fisheries” (Cambridge, 2010).

It seems ok. Sorry I can’t spend longer but there seem to be around 90 comments on this book to date and Mosh appears to have made around 107 of them…

I had the same problem as climatereason with the PDF file opened in the browser, but after downloading it, cutting and pasting works fine. E.g., this rather surprising remark that is erroneous in several ways.
“Recent studies concur that the trend in the fraction of anthropogenic CO2 from all sources, not only the combustion of fossil fuels, that remains in the atmosphere is rather stable at 0.44% with an increase of only 0.3%.yr-1, which is not significantly different from zero: no trend in the relative size of this fraction can therefore be detected. “

Judith, thanks for the reference. I have sped read the the entire book, and will now go back and study a number of sections. His discussion of Arctic variability, oceans (wind driven currents, regional variation, cycles), and marine ecosystems (fisheries as temperature proxies, overblown ‘acidification’, the consequences of fishing out parrotfish) contain a wealth of material that is new to me. He certainly touches on all the usual warmunist alarms, as is readily seen from the TC. One overwhelming takeaway is how biased the IPCC process has been, because a lot of his published counter information simply is missing or glossed over. Positive, having studied AR4 and AR5, both WG1 and WG2, cover to cover.

Anyone who has taken a look at the founding documents for the IPCC, the 1990 UN World Climate Conference, or the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The whole process was political from the beginning to establish the human effects on the climate for the UN to use. By design, the IPCC reports never included any studies on basic climate mechanisms, climate/weather interactions, or any related science.

This should not be a surprise to anyone interested in the climate, weather, climate change, or climate science. The entire problem is a result of a political process designed for political purposes.

Of course not, although he presents arguments from both sides and extensively discusses uncertainty and doubt.

Dr. Curry says he presents in the above sentence.

My reply is the AGW side has nothing to present that is even remotely supportive of their asinine theory. Zero!

This is the trouble with some when it comes to this subject which is they can’t bring themselves to say AGW theory is wrong and here are the reasons.
You can not have it both ways, AGW theory is either right or wrong. I say it is 100% dead wrong and we will know before this decade ends.

I do not think that there is adequate information to conclude that AGW will lead to significantly net negative conditions for the USA or the world overall.

You simply do not seem to understand the difference between the basic theory and some people’s beliefs about how the impact of the basic theory will be amplified by additional forcings that are hypothesized to increase the negative impact on humans.

Rob and Salvatore are using two different meanings of AGW. S is referring to CAGW, which includes strong positive feedback. R is referring to the no feedback GHG case. Hence they do not disagree because their talking past one another, talking about two different things.

I think I have been pretty clear to distinguish between denial of the greenhouse effect, which is really denial of physics, and questioning AGW, which does not necessarily involve denying basic physics but does involve adopting a very selective view of the evidence.

My reply the above from an AGW theory supporter.

Joel here is the evidence. Why don’t you refute each point with data ,not theory to prove I am wrong. You will not do it because there is no supportive data. I would hardly call all these blunders SELECT EVIDENCE.

In addition past historical climatic data shows the climate change that has taken place over the past 150 years is nothing special or unprecedented, and has been exceeded many times over in similar periods of time in the historical climatic record. I have yet to see data showing otherwise.

Data has also shown CO2 has always been a lagging indicator not a leading indicator. It does not lead the temperature change. If it does I have yet to see data confirming this.

SOME ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES AND OTHER MAJOR WRONG CALLS.

GREATER ZONAL ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION -WRONG

TROPICAL HOT SPOT – WRONG

EL NINO MORE OF -WRONG

GLOBAL TEMPERATURE TREND TO RISE- WRONG

LESSENING OF OLR EARTH VIA SPACE -WRONG? I have a study showing this to be so.

LESS ANTARCTIC SEA ICE-WRONG

GREATER /MORE DROUGHTS -WRONG

MORE HURRICANES/SEVERE WX- WRONG

STRATOSPHERIC COOLING- ?? because lack of major volcanic activity and less ozone due to low solar activity can account for this. In addition water vapor concentrations decreasing.

WATER VAPOR IN ATMOSPHERE INCREASING- WRONG- all of the latest data shows water vapor to be on the decrease.

AEROSOL IMPACT- WRONG- May be less then a cooling agent then expected, meaning CO2 is less then a warming agent then expected.

OCEAN HEAT CONTENT TO RISE- WRONG – this has leveled off post 2005 or so. Levels now much below model projections.

Those are the major ones but there are more. Yet AGW theory lives on.
Maybe it is me , but I was taught when you can not back up a theory with data and through observation that it is time to move on and look into another theory. Apparently this does not resonate when it comes to AGW theory , and this theory keeps living on to see yet another day.

Maybe once the global temperature trend shows a more definitive down trend which is right around the corner (according to my studies ) this nonsense will come to an end. Time will tell.

From the massive postings of Mosher and his ilk, they appear rather concerned that this book will have a significant and unfavorable impact on their stances and, therefore, they need to squelch the postings of others as extensively as possible. Too many topics being addressed all at once, I suspect for them. Their posting frequency here is even stronger, from I viewpoint, than their bashing of JC in “JC’s Conscience”. Double “hittings” bing applied here.

“Yet the seeds of what was to dominate the literature today had already been planted much earlier with the studies of Arrhenius, Tyndall and Fourier in the 19th century that introduced the concept of the CO2 greenhouse effect-Alan Longhurst”

None of the mentioned names ever spoke of heat trapping gases or backradiation. Arrhenius called the concept as untested. He only used absorption coefficient in his calculation, which is a reasonably sound science. The concept of greenhouse gas effect as we know it appears to be introduced by modern climatologists, and historians do not seem to know when and how. I really would like to know.

Tonyb, I did research this. So did Steve McIntyre, in a different way at a different time. So far as either of us can find (and I no way place myself in SteveMc’s league except for complusive data searching), Callendar 1938, presented to the RS by proxy by Dr. Dobson F.R.S. since Callendar was a ‘mere engineer’, is the first precise description of log(CO2) AND the first realistic estimate of ECS ~ 1.7. An intellectual tour de force. Essay Sensitive Uncertainty.

Eli may have a robust way to remind you of a resolution you just made to read before commenting, TonyB:

Well it turns out that while Slocum was skeptical of many of Callendar’s choices of records to exclude he was no one’s fool. If bunnies go and read the paper the conclusion in the conclusion, reasonable at the time, was

It may be hoped that the collection of standardized measurements of CO2 can be made a part of the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year program. Once a dependable set of observational data has been assembled, the evidence of the old observations can perhaps be reevaluated. If such new reevaluation proves impracticable, even then a reliable set of new worldwide observations can serve as a basis for comparison in future years.

In summary, the data, at present available, are inadequate as they now stand to prove or disprove a statistically significant trend in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If and when an upward trend has been demonstrated, and its cause ascertained, it will then be valid to base physical explanations of atmospheric events on the assumption that CO2 is increasing. Meanwhile, Callendar’s interesting extrapolations (through the 22d century) of the effects of burning up of the world’s fuel, stimulate the interest of the speculatively minded.

This paper provided strong motivation within the Weather Bureau for funding the Keeling measurements on Mauna Loa as part of the 1957-58 IGU. Moreover, Slocum was exactly right, the Keeling measurements quickly lead to to re-evaluation of the older records, indicating that Callendar’s selection was the correct one and pointing to reasons why many of the older measurements were problematic. The Slocum paper also has an important listing of early measurements.

Read harder as Mosh might say. Slocum (and much of the establishment of the time) considered it was refuted (in full or in part) and his writing style is certainly elegant and clear compared to much of todays scientific output.

Elsewhere you say;

‘When you do, please take time to take back your “elegantly refuted” instead of going silent like you did earlier and elswhere in the thread’

Where do you mean? Perhaps I had gone to bed. If so, sorry about sleeping.

> Slocum (and much of the establishment of the time) considered it was refuted […]

Hence his claim that ” the data, at present available, are inadequate as they now stand to prove or disprove a statistically ” etc, TonyB. In other words, Slocum explicitly contradicts your claim in the conclusion of his paper. There’s no need to read harder.

Even Pop removed that reference in his bogus list.

***

> Where do you mean?

Look for another place where I responded to one of your comment, TonyB.

For the first “what” you need to search for my name on the page or for “South Africa”, TonyB. It’s easier to do than to try to copy-paste from Alan’s review. It’s quite possible you have not seen it, but I doubt you were sleeping, since you wrote a bit later:

I will at least read the book before commenting. It would make for a better informed discussion if everyone else did the same before shooting from the hip.

This resolution contrasts with the second “what,” i.e. your reading of Slocum’s paper. Slocum’s “the data, at present available, are inadequate as they now stand to prove or disprove a statistically” (and passim) clearly contradicts your claim that Slocum “elegantly refuted” Callendar’s conjecture.

***

Do you think Judy read the book before saying it’s a tour de force, BTW?

My comment about reading the book was made very early on, when, as far as I recall, there had as yet been very few comments, so not sure of your first point..

The scientific establishment of the day (mostly) refuted Callendar’s work and in the years following his treatise in 1938 their doubts grew. It came to a point where Callendar himself doubted his own theory just a year or so before his death, due to a combination of a decade long decline in temperatures and the very severe Little Ice Age type winter in 1962/3

First link hereunder is a remark by another commenter following up on one of my comments, the second is mine. The text is reproduced for your convenience;

——- ——-

“The photomontage heading this thread was from James Fleming’s bio of Callendar published by the American Meteorological Society. I came across one of Callendar’s papers about 25 years ago while involved in an engineering investigation re constraints on infrared absorption/ emission by unsaturated air, and was interested to preorder a copy of Fleming’s book when it was published in 2007.

On page 31 Fleming writes that “his confidence in the theory of climate warming, however, was shaken by the downturn in global temperature in the 1950s and 1960s”. In chapter 5 Fleming discussed Callendar’s puzzlement that the climate did not continue to warm monotonically and his hope that improved measurements of the dispersal of CO2 and more comprehensive temperature measurements would resolve the issue.

Shortly before his death, Callendar speculated in his notes about the reasons for the growing non-acceptance of his theory by his peers.

In 1964 he had an exchange with birdwatcher G Harris (see Weather 19, 264-265 March 1964) which appeared to end with Callendar conceding “a general decline of (European) temperature in recent years remains unaffected by considerations” of author bias, computational errors, and changes in the location of some stations as reasons for the cooling trend of up to 10degC reported by Harris.
Some other refs: Handel M & Risbey J, Climatic Change 21 (1992) 97-255
Weart S, Bulletin Atomic Sci June 1992, 19-27

Well, I looked through the cd archives. They are often a very difficult read as much of it is in the form of hand written notes and letters and data entered into notebooks.

Some very interesting exchanges with the great and good of the day including Lamb, Manley and Keeling. Interesting letter from Lamb to the Guardian in 1963 commenting about the decade long downturn in temperatures and also from the Met office acknowledging Callendar’s point that SST’s in 1890 were substantially warmer than in 1910.

I will have to re-read the written biography again sometime, but for those interested in the intense period of scientific endeavour from the 1930’s to the 1960’s you could do worse than buy the archives and have a browse through. A little at a time to spare your eyesight.

—— —— ——-

When his peers and the author himself comes to doubt his own theory I think it is fair to say that it was fairly well refuted (at that time) I find Slocum’s writing elegant, but that is of course subjective.

I have Callendar’s archives and have read the biography twice. I very much like him and his achievements and his inventiveness during the war was intriguing.

Before you began treading on all the Angels toes as you started to dance on the rather well worn head of a pin, did you have any substantive comments to make about the Kimberley data I posted, as you seem to have gone off on one of your entertaining tangents?

You will remember that I reckoned that using the earlier Kimberley temperature data in order to draw definitive conclusions was perhaps not wise, whether the material came from the author of the book or from Mosh

As I started writing my previous lengthy response I saw a comment from Judith that she had read many of the drafts. Presumably if she read the final one she would not have found a need to read the final book. There are only so many times you can read large amounts of text before your eyes glaze over and you fail to spot changes and mistakes

The book would benefit from a firm editor and some spell checking etc. This is a job you would be admirably suited for, why don’t you offer your services?

> My comment about reading the book was made very early on, when, as far as I recall, there had as yet been very few comments, so not sure of your first point.

If you read that thread, TonyB, you ought to know that I follow comments using an RSS reader. Which means I get to read comments in chronological order. Your comment about Kimberley was made a tad later than your comment about reading the book first. Considering that the Moshpit has linked to Kimberley, South Africa, it may not have been the best of times to insert your remark about Kimberley, Canada.

Search harder. Click harder.

Passive resistance is futile.

***

Read harder too:

> The scientific establishment of the day (mostly) refuted Callendar’s work and in the years following his treatise in 1938 their doubts grew.

Before we go chasing that storytelling squirrel, it might be nice of you if you acknowledged that the conclusion of Slocum 1955 contains words that contradict your own interpretation of that paper.

> Presumably if she read the final one she would not have found a need to read the final book.

We’re not talking about spelling or even wording, TonyB. There’s no reason to expect that Alan’s storyline changed much. It comes straight from the Contrarian Matrix. I’ve even added a sentence for it:

The essential debate on these issues will not take place, at least not openly and without prejudice.

Sorry, I suspect you are playing climate ball whilst I am not, as I don’t begin to understand the point of your pin head dancing with squirrels.

I made the comment about reading the book, then half an hour later, after reading Chapter 4, I asked Mosh for his take on Kimberley. I would like your take as well but you seem to have gone off in a direction that has your squirrels running in your wake giving you quizzical looks.

When the author of the 1938 paper comes to doubt his own theory and the scientific establishment of the time increasingly come to doubt it as well, I think that is pretty well refuted. That it later gained credence does not alter the facts of the time.

The greenhouse theory went against the scientific establishments prevailing thoughts in the middle part of the last century .

Callendar himself came to doubt it -as referenced above- and in that he was merely reflecting the status quo and perhaps acknowledging peer pressure and the reality of the downwards temperature trend.

At some point the establishment mostly came to believe in his theory. It didn’t happen during his lifetime as he died in 1964 as temperatures entered their second decade of relative decline.

When that tipping point came was really the point of nabils original question.

My guess is that it became the generally prevailing scientific viewpoint in the late 1970’s or so as more and more researchers realised that the cooling trend had reversed. Whether there was a particular paper that caused the tipping point remains to be found. I suspect again that there was a growing consensus which Hansen articulated in 1988 and brought centre stage.

Interestingly, his paper used many of the 200 temperature stations that callendar had used in the 1930’s. In that he was following the Mitchell curves, a forerunner of many modern data sets.

The met office initially had a low opinion of callendar as he was considered an amateur on the fringes of science.

Seems like too many are taking the view that “seeds” contain all that will be generated from the “seed’. In the general sense, “seeds”, in the context that we often use them in science, are just the springing forth of the imagination.

Seems some would have us believe that the “the knowledge of fire, wheels, etc” were not “seeds” because they did not explicitly call out all the components of modern day science that are even remotely associated with them. Seems more reasonable to view “seeds” as the engenders of imagination about a vast world of knowledge hitherto unimagined. It is a sorry state of affairs when this sort of nitpicking about definitions is the main emphasis that can dredge up.

This is placed here, but it belongs in many places in this blog. So, I make no singular call-out to this person, but, rather, to those in general who desire to nitpick about what was in the “seeds” instead of accepting that not all concepts are totally thought out and presented at conception.

If you’re referring to Horace de Saussure that would be 18th century: 1740-1799. In 1767 de Saussure invented the heat-trapping solar oven, which works by allowing incoming insolation in through a glass window, but blocks the outgoing longwave radiation. “The highest temperature he reached was 230 °F, which he found did not vary significantly when the box was carried from the top of Mt. Cramont in the Swiss Alps down to the Plains of Cournier, 4,852 feet below in altitude and 34 °F above in temperature, thereby establishing that the external air temperature played no significant role in this solar heating effect.”

Saussure also invented a number of instruments for measuring climate parameters. “In the Essai sur l’hygrométrie, published in 1783, he records experiments made with various forms of hygrometer in all climates and at all temperatures, and supports the claims of his hair hygrometer against all others. He invented and improved many kinds of apparatus, including the magnetometer, the cyanometer for estimating the blueness of the sky, the diaphanometer for judging of the clearness of the atmosphere, the anemometer and the mountain eudiometer.”

“His modifications of the thermometer adapted that instrument to many purposes: for ascertaining the temperature of the air he used one with a fine bulb hung in the shade or whirled by a string, the latter form being converted into an evaporimeter by inserting its bulb into a piece of wet sponge and making it revolve in a circle of known radius, at a known rate; for experiments on the earth and in deep water he employed large thermometers wrapped in non-conducting coatings so as to render them extremely sluggish, and capable of long retaining the temperature once they had attained it.”

In the 1850s Tyndall invented the spectrophotometer and used it to measure the extent of absorption of radiated heat by a number of gases. He gives a table of 13 gases with explicit absorptivities relative to air, including CO2 but oddly not water vapor, and says “Every gas in this table is perfectly transparent to light, that is to say, all waves within the limits of the visible spectrum pass through it without obstruction; but for the waves of slower period, emanating from our heated plate of copper, enormous differences of absorptive power are manifested. These differences illustrate in the most unexpected manner the influence of chemical combination. Thus the elementary gases, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and the mixture atmospheric air, prove to be practical vacua to the rays of heat; for every ray, or more strictly speaking, for every unit of wave motion, which any one of them is competent to intercept, perfectly transparent ammonia intercepts 5460 units, olefiant gas 6030 units, while sulphurous acid gas absorbs 6480 units. What becomes of the wave motion thus intercepted? It is applied to the heating of the absorbing gas. Through air, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, on the contrary, the waves of ether pass without absorption, and these gases are not sensibly changed in temperature by the most powerful calorific rays. The position of nitrous oxide in the foregoing table is worthy of particular notice. In this gas we have the same atoms in a state of chemical union, that exist uncombined in the atmosphere; but the absorption of the compound is 1800 times that of the air.”

Tyndall acknowledges a number of predecessors, saying “De Saussure, Fourier, M. Pouillet, and Mr. Hopkins regard this interception of terrestrial rays as exercising the most important influence on climate.”

There is also Horace’s grandson Henri de Saussure, a distinguished entomologist and geologist. Even more famous is Henri’s oldest son (of nine children) Ferdinand de Saussure. Less well known is Ferdinand’s linguist brother René de Saussure who was an important figure in the development of Esperanto before abandoning it in favor of his invention of Esperanto II. (Motto: when you’re on a good thing stick to it.)

@nabilswedan: We know today that this is not the case. All gases absorb solar radiation at different rates.

Very profound, Nabil. Equally profound is that we also know that all stars warm the Earth at different rates, with our own Sun at the head of the list. We can even calculate to an accuracy far better than picowatts per square kilometer just how much they vary.

a) interesting that there was a statue to Horace-who you had specifically named. Of less interest is that I had suggested my reluctant wife come over to view it, thereby delaying our visit to the adjacent café for a hot chocolate by a few minutes. This also demonstrates the virtue of observations as I can confirm it does exist…

b) That Nicolas was especially relevant bearing in mind his were some of the earliest readings of atmospheric co2–a subject of more than usual interest to Denizens.

Of course, you might think the assorted relatives you have assembled to have some sort of passing relevance as well.

Perhaps Mosher is distracted by his new mission. Building mountains from molehills. Do we really care if data is adjusted by hand? What is the alternative? A roboadjuster? Did he miss the Lungi clue? A person or roboadjuster determined that Lungi, a small beach community that has not changed since 1950 should have the same temperatures as Dakar. Amazing!

I really appreciate this eBook, just started reading this evening. As said elsewhere, putting the text through a spell checker and editing repeated or broken lines and words would be a big plus… These are avoidable glitches in an (mostly) excellent text.

Not to mention the inserted missing ‘nn” page references. But you get what you pay for.
I had much worse experiences with a real editor and an actual eBook publisher. Like WRONG charts. Like a mistyped label to a cartoon that I went and got the author’s express permission to reproduce! And provided the ebook publisher as a single image file. Inexcusable, but reality.
This mgnificent effort is to be applauded for its merits, not criticized for its minor surface blemishes.

To my recollection Lamb knew nothing about how to extract periodic components from a broadband signal and did so incorrectly.

He was erudite and an important founder of paleoclimate; his magnum opus is rather interesting and unlike most here I have read it. Also unlike most here I know something about spectral analysis. Lamb’s mathematics was naive and his calculations about periodicity are justifiably not considered relevant.

I seem to recall writing a longer explanation but I’m not finding it. But I wrote in 1997 shortly after reading it that “Lamb is not considered a reliable source these days. He was a very interesting man and writes remarkably well, but his grasp of statistics was weak, and some of his graphs are, well, bogus. He simply overdrew his conclusions in many ways.”

MT, it would be greatly appreciated if you would guest post more here. As an econometrician, I know a fair (but rusty) bit about spectral analysis- and a bunch of orher stats stuff. So your assessments of both odd hooks and modern science would be interesting to evaluate. So far, the modern (climate) science stuff is not doing so well. Even by first year college standards.
The new Stanford paper applying 1940’s aurocorreleation techniques to the 21st century pause? Gimme a break. We learned better than that as undergrads in the 1970’s. Please show your homework.

What do you consider to be his magnum opus? If you read it in 1997 are you talking about the second edition of ‘Climate history and the modern world’ first published in 1982? He did of course carry out a great deal of valuable research and this was just one publication amongst very many.

Lamb was the first director of CRU in 1972 and remains an outstanding source of information on climate. I would recommend anyone unfamiliar with his work to buy ‘Climate history and the modern world’ which they will find interesting, well referenced and still relevant.

His painstaking research on historic climate reconstruction and lack of ability to respond to his critics due to his death in 1997 means that those uncomfortable with his research find him an easy target to criticise.

@MT: To my recollection Lamb knew nothing about how to extract periodic components from a broadband signal and did so incorrectly.

Michael, do you know any more about extracting periodic components than Lamb? And if so have you been able to extract any periodic components from Central England Temperature more correctly than Lamb? If you have, would you care to share them with us?

I’ve had two graduate level courses on the subject from the editor of the 1970s IEEE volume on it, one D. G. Childers. (“Modern Spectral Analysis” IIRC) My grasp is quite rusty now but was fresh when I read Lamb.

It is my recollection that it was clear from the text that he had no idea about preconditioning data or extracting significant periodicities from noisy records.

In my opinion, on physical grounds, is unlikely that any meaningful periodicities are in the record, so no, I can’t do “better” if “better” means identifying things that aren’t meaningfully there.

The idea that climate variability is usefully modeled as a superposition of periodicities is at best an unproven hypothesis, but some analyses take it for granted. The approach is fundamentally flawed. Lamb was neither the first nor the last to do this badly.

Whether it’s worth digging up the relevant material and going through it again is dubious as far as I’m concerned. One would have to find Longhurst’s approach worth bothering with in the first place. I just wanted to point out that he’s not starting on a strong foundation.

I don’t know that me brushing up on spectral analysis and posting for a general readership would add any value to the climate conversation. I think there are other places where an engineering background are more relevant to climate theory. All I’m claiming is that Lamb’s approach struck me as mathematically naive. Since he wrote contemporaneously with the development of the theory, this is not terribly to his discredit. But it’s bizarre to be picking that thread up now.

I am 1/2 way through the book (I admit to being a slow reader) and several items stand out to me. Longhurst goes through his arguments and then moves on. No moralizing or not very much. Those items to which I pay particular attention have to do with oceanography which I understand was his career vocation. Other items that were mentioned have been mention before on this blog by Chief (Robert Ellison), and Capt’nDallas regarding ocean currents and abrupt climate change plus the talking points of Willis Eschenbach regarding tropical cumulus clouds.

I sure wish Steven Mosher was more specific regarding his dissing chapter 4. Making comparisons between BEST and other data sets is not my shtick.

So far, the book seems to be a narrative providing a viewpoint that I can read, absorb and consider; really, all that I believe Longhurst wanted.

The author raises objections to the hypothesis that man burning fossil fuels is causing climate change that were raised in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and researchers looked at each objection and found that none could account for the observed change in the environment.

For example, the sun is not increasing its energy output enough.

The sun is not moving closer or hitting the earth more in the northern hemisphere enough.

There are not enough volcanoes to cause the warming,

The earth’s core is not undergoing higher nuclear reactions to warm the earth.

The earth has not been hit by more objects from space to cause warming.

And on and on through all the proposed alternative reasons.

The author simply raises the objections but fails to report the research that excludes those factors as causing the changing environment.

We do not completely understand past periods of warming and cooling, but we do know that
1) they never happened as fast as the earth is warming over the past two centuries – fossil fuel burning has been increasing for four centuries
2) they coincide with major events like massive volcanoes or big meteor or comet impacts, none of which have occurred at the scale required for over five centuries

Why doesn’t the author actually do original research to prove that something other than burning fossil fuels is causing the problem, something that no scientist has ever thought to study in the past century?? Maybe nothing the author can think of hasn’t already been researched and excluded???

Michael Pettengill. Are you aware the Earth is ~ 4.5 billion years old? Yet, you claim to know in detail the exact rate of warming and cooling from the past? Where’s your data, Michael? The proxies we do have indicate warming rates from the past that exceed the rate now. Of course, the proxies carry uncertainty.

[…] they never happened as fast as the earth is warming over the past two centuries – fossil fuel burning has been increasing for four centuries […]

Actually, nobody knows that. This is the primary reason the “hockey stick” is essentially a fraud: a high-resolution modern record was effectively grafted onto the end of a much more “smoothed” record (or pseudo-record constructed from “proxies”).

The temperature “rise” you’re talking about lasted about 2 decades. Such dramatic increases (and corresponding decreases) may well have happened during the Medieval Climatic Optimum. Indeed, they may well have happened during the Little Ice Age.

All the “proxies” we have for those times are more or less local, and any effort to provide a “global average” will inevitably smooth things out compared to how a thermometer index might have looked.

Bottom line: we don’t know. Decade-scale variation on top of sub-century and century scale variation and the final exit from the Little Ice Age due to internal “unforced” variation with no contribution from anthropogenic CO2 are fully consistent with the observations.

So is some level of decade-scale variation “overlaid” on some level of rise from anthropogenic CO2. As are many varieties of combination of the two.

A major volcano is usually associated with temporary COOLING, not warming. This is perhaps counter-intuitive, as volcanos are really hot, but the sulfur dioxide gas emitted by the volcano is further oxidized in the stratosphere to sulfur trioxide, then combines with water forming thin clouds of tiny droplets of sulfuric acid. This raises the albedo of the earth a little for a couple years, reducing the sunlight absorbed at the surface.

The way I read MP’s first sentence (which is not easy) plus his list of “objections”, Longhurst is either saying there were not enough volcanoes to explain the warming or that someone else was saying same.

Wouldn’t this comment mean that whomever said it (the original objection) has very limited knowledge regarding the effect of volcanoes on the climate?

Thanks for the reply. I was assuming climate science is interested in average temperature because it’s a proxy for energy in the atmosphere & oceans. So say for a weather a station with a minimum of 270K and a maximum of 320K in a single day. Is the best average (270+320)/2=295K or (in excel) = power((power(270, 4)+power(320,4))/2, 0.25) which comes to 298.1K ?

The latter would seem to me to be best energy proxy however I can see how it would make life difficult.

“But the single number that represents a global mean surface temperature (GSMT) over land and sea – relentlessly recorded every month by several government science agencies – is based on data that are incompletely understood, that are often wrong, and collectively are perhaps meaningless. That changes in this number do not represent changes in heat content of the oceans and atmosphere is very little discussed, yet this is the quantity that is critical to understanding the dynamics of radiatively-forced climate change, be it the Sun or CO2 that does the forcing.190 Such are the problems addressed in this chapter.”

Yes, this global surface number is simply absurd. One cannot measure the heat content of the atmosphere from the boundary layer, not to mention that most of the area is done by SSTs. Only the satellite measurements are real and they do not show any GHG warming.

At the risk of ad hominem, consider who developed and adjusted these surface statistical models. Wigley, Jones, Hansen and Karl. Warmers all. When I first started to question these surface models, many years ago, I got an angry email from Wigley, saying they knew about these problems. My response was that unlike them, I was prepared to conclude that the model results were incorrect.

The ESRL AMO is significantly detrended and still matches the RSS. Interesting. What does this mean? I think the UAH will soon be discredited by the skeptical community because it is rising too fast for them.

“A doctor has a an anal thermometer and phone access to a satellite passing overhead. He needs to know the baby’s temperature so he can save it. ”

The doctor has a billion babies. Some have thermometers. Most don’t. All different kinds of thermometers…digital…analog, mercury, etc. Some are measured anally, some in the ear, some under the arm. Some under the tongue. Some are measured in the morning in the sun. Some at night outside. Sometimes they change when they measure. Sometimes they just guess. Sometimes, they give them hot tea and measure before bed. Sometimes, the babies die and they measure a different one.

Maybe the billion babies need saving. Maybe not.

The satellite measures all the babies, all the time, the same way. It’s not perfect either, but it treats all the babies the same.

We can see how different the satellite data is from the thermometer data for the troposphere, by plotting the difference between the two (annual averages):

This suggests that something happened around 2000 to cause these data sets to diverge. Thermometers didn’t change how they measure temperature, nor balloons how they rise through the atmosphere. But satellite instruments have gone through many changes, satellite orbits have altered, and the satellites themselves change over time. I strongly suspect that there’s a serious problem with the satellite data after about the year 2000, as indicated by their divergence from thermometer data.

UAH shows a step warming coincident with the giant ENSO. No warming before and none after, but the latter flat line is a little warmer that the prior flat line. This is not GHG warming, unless there is a huge heat capacitor hidden somewhere in the system. The steady increase in GHGs cannot produce no warming for 20 years, then a jump during a giant El Nino, followed by no warming for 15 years.

Yeah, JCH, I don’t know what to make of the satellite measurements. The difference between the version trends is so large. That makes you wonder what is going wrong that would cause such a disparity. Because it’s obvious something is wrong.

The steady increase in GHGs cannot produce no warming for 20 years, then a jump during a giant El Nino, followed by no warming for 15 years.

The climate is a hyper-complex non-linear system. It could certainly “produce no warming for 20 years, then a jump during a giant El Nino, followed by no warming for 15 years” in response to the “steady increase in GHGs”. Unfortunately, it could also produce it as a result of unforced internal variation. Or all sorts of other things.

I just gave a “potential explanation[…] other than AGW”. Unforced internal variation. A natural component of discrete non-linear dynamical systems. But I found a few papers discussing internal variability, albeit from a perspective of a prior assumption that “global warming” is happening. Meaning that they couldn’t be used to “prove” “global warming” without begging the question.

This book focuses on two major challenges in the climate sciences: 1) to describe the decadal-to-centennial variations in instrumental and proxy records; and 2) to distinguish between anthropogenic variations and natural variability. The National Taiwan University invited some of the world’s leading experts across the areas of observational analysis, mathematical theory, and modeling to discuss these two issues. The outcome of the meeting is the 23 chapters in this book that review the state of the art in theoretical, observational and modeling research on internal, unforced and externally forced climate variability. The main conclusion of this research is that internal climate variability on decadal and longer time scales is so large that sidestepping it may lead to false estimates of the climate’s sensitivity to anthropogenic forcing.

“This suggests that something happened around 2000 to cause these data sets to diverge. Thermometers didn’t change how they measure temperature, nor balloons how they rise through the atmosphere. But satellite instruments have gone through many changes, satellite orbits have altered, and the satellites themselves change over time. I strongly suspect that there’s a serious problem with the satellite data after about the year 2000, as indicated by their divergence from thermometer data.”

I agree there is a divergence. Eventually we will resolve this. In the meantime, skeptics will love their satellites and non-skeptics will love their ground base.

But, I think your conclusions are a bit hasty. Thermometers do change. More importantly, the methods of adjusting them and gridding them have changed a lot.

What if there was a third source of data to compare them to get some sort of validation? I believe there is in the CFS data.

This data series is developed objectively every hour to initialize the climate models and archive historical grids. Other similar schemes initialize the weather models every day. The data includes all valid data sources… sfc obs, balloon, sat data, aircraft recon, etc.

Compared on a monthly basis to GISS, Hadcrut, UAH, and RSS, the correlations are all about the same. Makes sense because it uses the same data.

The trend is what is interesting. Since 2000, land based temp indexes show significant warming, satellites just a small amount and the CFS data shows slight cooling.

This would seem to give the trend accuracy nod to the satellite data.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to claim to know the answer. However, I do know that the divergence is real and there is a limit to how long it can continue. In the meantime, in the last 12 months, satellites have been warmer than sfc data.

So, skeptics, be careful what you fall in love with. Better if everybody just keeps working transparently to make the data better.

@Roscoe Shaw: Since 2000, land based temp indexes show significant warming, satellites just a small amount and the CFS data shows slight cooling. This would seem to give the trend accuracy nod to the satellite data.

Comparing global troposphere to land is apples and oranges because (a) 70% of the troposphere is over sea, not land and (b) evaporation and spray make for a much more intimate thermal contact of air with sea than with land. One would therefore expect lower troposphere to track sea surface closely, certainly much more closely than land. And one would also expect the troposphere to fluctuate more on account of having a thermal inertia equivalent to only the top 3 m of ocean, which is less than 10% of the oceanic mixed layer.

So does the data bear out these expectations? Well, here’s RSS and SST (HadSST3 global), both smoothed to a 5-year running mean, with RSS offset by 0.12 so that both have the same mean over 1979-now. Judge for yourself.

The RSS trend is +1.21 °C/century while that of SST is +1.27 °C/century (click on Raw Data at the WoodForTrees link). The UAH trend is +1.39 °C/century. The mean of the two satellite trends is 1.30 °C/century which is within 0.03 of the SST trend. Since the two satellite trends are so far apart this would seem to give the trend accuracy nod to the sea surface data.

Although there were no satellite observations of the lower troposphere prior to 1979, the foregoing expectation of close tracking, backed up by its excellent empirical confirmation, makes SST likely to be the best proxy we’ll ever have for the lower troposphere prior to 1979, better even than if there’d been satellites back then given the significant disagreement between RSS and UAH.

Incidentally unlike some people I do believe the hiatus happened; for one thing it’s quite visible in the graph I just gave. I found the statistical proofs that the hiatus didn’t happen, implicitly by Santer et al and more explicitly by Rajaratnam et al, unconvincing for multiple reasons, the main one being the modeling, in both papers, of climate fluctuations not attributable to CO2 as random noise, as opposed to a combination of signals well correlated with accurately observable natural phenomena.

“But the single number that represents a global mean surface temperature (GSMT) over land and sea – relentlessly recorded every month by several government science agencies – is based on data that are incompletely understood, that are often wrong, and collectively are perhaps meaningless.
1. It’s MORE THAN a single number. You can choose to look at the whole field (360*180 numbers), You can choose to look at the average of all those.
2. The data is understood. I understand it every month. I can tell you what it is, what the uncertainty is and what it is likely to be next month. EVERY FRICKING DAY national weather services use this data to forecast weather. Its the same fricking data.
3. ALL measurement is wrong. UAH, RSS, land ocean… all of it. But its correct enough to tell us
A) climate was changing… and lately it paused!

“That changes in this number do not represent changes in heat content of the oceans and atmosphere is very little discussed, yet this is the quantity that is critical to understanding the dynamics of radiatively-forced climate change, be it the Sun or CO2 that does the forcing.190 Such are the problems addressed in this chapter.”

This is perhaps the most inane comment.
Suppose I told you that the top speed of a car was 160mph and YOUR response was that “this told me nothing about the gas milage”
OF COURSE the temperature tells you little about the heat content
DUH, DUH, DUH, DUH. and DUH!
he is criticizing an elephant for not being a mouse.

when people make dumb arguments even if they are on your side.. just tell them to stop

It wasn’t dumb. Just a little unclear.

The whole “global warming” thing is a bait-and-switch. Adding CO2 might change the climate, and that might have effects we don’t like. There might be serious negative effects even if the “global average temperature” doesn’t change. There might be no serious effects even if the “global average temperature” does change.

The “global average temperature” is a myth: anything you compute from measuring temperature at/near the surface is irrelevant to planetary heat loss via radiation. (And so is your whole “temperature field”.) Anything you compute as the “average radiative temperature” is irrelevant to what surface/lower troposphere temperatures do.

When things don’t make sense, there are many possibilities –e.g., we’re all too stupid or everyone else is or we don’t know as much as we think we do or there are powerful ulterior motives underlying why people say and believe what they do even though reality paints a different picture. Or, it’s because we simply believe without facts and despite alternative explanations and evidence to the contrary, which pretty much explains belief in global warming, i.e., it has become a religion.

One of my motivations for completing the book was finding to what extent ‘climate change’ had become a religion… I have tried to emphasise that I really dont think the science is as settled as many pretend… you cant understand how the ocean works from studying one region – just as I know that you cant make any solid conclusions about how the climate works from studying just the short period since 1960, which is what many people are doing. ~Alan Longhurst

Interesting parallel between VW’s diesel scandal and global warming. VW was not able to make diesel cars that gave the results they were after and still meet pollution standards so they used software that gave them the results they wanted. What’s illegal in the automotive industry and immoral by any standard in the business world in general is, however, common practice in the field of climatology, even despite the fact they’ve been caught.

I found him on google at the NOAA link technical memo ;Sep 1989 Southwest Fisheries Center at Scripps; The First 25 Years. His PhD was from Bedford College University of London and D.Sc University of London

Good to see a qualified oceanographer’s physically-motivated take on available climate data thoroughly documented. This is a much needed antidote to the blind number-crunching perspective of “global temperature index” makers, who treat what should be data as mere numbers to be variously adjusted to meet geophysically naïve expectations. Despite some warts, here and there, the message is abundantly clear: the globe is far from being well-covered by data adequate for bona fide scientific work. The index makers are in the business of creating salable fiction.

Looks like Dr. Evans is ready to take a second run at a climate model.
…
New Science 1: Pushing the edge of climate research. Back to the new-old way of doing science
…
1. Introducing a Series of Blog Posts on Climate Science
Dr David Evans, 22 September 2015. Project home page.

Breaking the Intellectual Standoff

There is an intellectual standoff in climate change. Skeptics point to empirical evidence that disagrees with the climate models. Yet the climate scientists insist that their calculations showing a high sensitivity to carbon dioxide are correct — because they use well established physics, such as spectroscopy, radiation physics, and adiabatic lapse rates.

How can well-accepted physics produce the wrong answer? We mapped out the architecture of their climate models and discovered that while the physics appears to be correct, the climate scientists applied it wrongly. Most of the projected warming comes from two specific mistakes.

Steven Mosher: There are SMART arguments about sampling: Pielke Sr. MAKES THEM
There are smart arguments about UHI and micro site: Ross (on methods)
(anthony on data)
There are smart arguments on adjustments: Brandon and carrick make them.

In case Alan Longhurst wants to update and upgrade this chapter in the future, he would do well to master the BEST treatment and master what Mosh here calls the “SMART arguments”. I don’t join Mosh in claiming that all of Lonhurst’s chapter is pitiful, but the treatment of BEST is “clearly inadequate”. In the end, the temperature trend reconstructions based on extant surface thermometers are not accurate enough to address the energy flow problems entailed in the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic greenhouse gas induced global warming. Hence my claim (2) above, even should Mosh’s advice be taken. Has the flow of energy into the deep oceans increased, thus creating the observed “pause”? What accounts for the greening of the Sahel over the last 40 years? Were the changes in ENSO caused by an increase in downwelling LWIR? Can the surface temperature records elucidate how much global natural variation independent of CO2 there has been? Why has the energy dissipation in hurricanes an typhoons remained as stable as it has?

Recommendations for improvement are a dime a dozen. If it were easy, IPCC wouldn’t take as long as they do.

The sea surface temperature record is even less informative than the land surface temperature record.

Judith, Climate Etc needs a tally sheet of postings. Posters like Mosher just fill the blog with 1-liners intended often as just needling. Godd that you have taken the initiative here. You have given Mosher and some other quite a bit a leeway. And, of course, he has bitched that he could not go on as infinitum.

A formal criticism, offering an improved method of using the same algorithm, was subsequently published but only after what the authors described as an ‘abusive peer “review’ that ran to a file of 88 pages.

No citation for that indirect quote.

***

Alan’s claim that

For this task, I have only very occasionally consulted the many Internet sites that contribute to the debate, and have clearly identified my handful of references to such material.

I haven’t read the book so I don’t know myself how well this item was referenced or cited, but there was enough in your quote for me to find it from what I remembered of the incident, ya know, like Mosher does.

The book is well written, technical but without equations – it is easily accessible to anyone with a technical education or who follows the technical climate blogs.

None of these claims pass the straight-face test. The text is poorly written in the classical sky dragon style of run-on sentence structures with convoluted and backward logic flow. It’s not technical at all, it just uses technical jargon in a random pattern. There is at least one equation, so that’s not true. It is not easily accessible to anyone with real technical skill because of the poor sentence structure, logic flow and lack of coherent content.

This tome leans heavily on solar and barycentric drivers to discount the influence of CO2 on increasing temperature. At the same time, it attempts to make a case that the temperature data is too sparse and overly manipulated to trust.

Calling this wordy disorganized melange of half-baked pipe dreams a Tour de Force is jumping the shark. It is disappointing to admit that ATTP, Eli, et al are right about Climate etc..

Horst makes an extraordinary number of generalised comments and I think this sniping and heavy artillery fire by a variety of commentators has detracted from the thread. Some of the criticism may well be valid, but because we are discussing a whole book with many complex ideas and subjects there has been relatively little homing in on any genuine problems the book may or may not have on specific topics.

Can I suggest that one chapter is taken as a stand alone article in the next few days, in the hope that people will focus on it and confine their criticism to the data contained within it and not go off on some unrelated subject.

Because of its importance I would suggest that Chapter Ten ‘The Ocean and sea level rise and ph’ is showcased. This starts on page 207. It also has the advantage that it may well be that those who are commenting may not yet have reached as far as page 207 so it will be new ground for them

During their comments people might actually like to be helpful and point out where, for example, there is ‘poor sentence structure, logic flow and lack of coherent content.’

Tony: I was refuting Dr. Curry’s generalization claiming a very high quality of the book with a generalization of my own. Based on my sampling of the book, it’s length could be easily shortened by half.

Ever the optometrist, I have started to plow through Chapter 10 based on your and Willard’s recommendation.

Spends mass quantities of words outlining many of the problems with Sea Level measurements, but then curtly concludes that IPCC ultimately gets it right. Blathers on and on that near-shore urbanization is bad with and without AGW SLR.

Cites recent peer reviewed papers on ocean acidification that demonstrate many marine organisms are robust in lower pH higher Temp conditions. Apparently rapid evolution may save the planet from collapse. The book slams California Current Acidification Network without cause for good measure. He fails to mention anthropomorphic nutrient loading via wastewater discharges and agricultural runoff that impacts nearshore marine ecosystem

“B.) The sampling is FINE if anything its over sampled. That is
why you can for example pick 110 PRISTINE sites in the US
(CRN) and predict the rest of the country: Including
100s of other pristine sites ( RCRN) and 1000’s of “bad” sites.
What’s it tell you when you can start with 60 samples and get
one time series… then add 300 and get the same,,, then add
3000 and get the same…. then add 30000 and get the same?
whats that tell you about sampling?
Whats it tell you when you can pick 5000 and then predict any
other 5000 or 10000?”

What it tells anyone with common sense is that all the sites have been linked to each other by an algorithm and are no longer individual raw or individual site modified data but data that has been homogenized to fit in with every adjacent site.
This is not something to be proud of.
This is scientifically very, very wrong.
Any true set of recordings makes allowance for the fact that temperatures very from minute to minute from site to site and that due to known weather variations sites do not have to match each other in step.
What Mosher alludes to is pure chicanery.
Any set of sample sites that agrees this perfectly means they are not real temperature recordings anyway in any form.
It is the Cowtan and Way Kriging experience over again.
You must be able to pick sites that do not agree with each other in any sample.
That is what weather temperature, measurement is all about.
When you link everything to each other so they all move in step whatever sample you take you do not have real measurements.

Try it on the raw data Steven. See if they all move the same way whether you use 2 or 50,000.
I will guarantee they don’t.
Take your modified data and prove they all link perfectly.
I guarantee they do as well. I have your word for it.
And what do you call your data?
Well not data anymore.

“E) Accuracy is a vague term.”
No it is a very accurate term
“for example pick 110 PRISTINE sites in the US
(CRN) and predict the rest of the country
you can for example 1000’s of “bad” sites.”

So in your system bad sites are just as accurate as pristine sites.
That alone makes none of them pristine any longer and all of them bad.

“What it tells anyone with common sense is that all the sites have been linked to each other by an algorithm and are no longer individual raw or individual site modified data but data that has been homogenized to fit in with every adjacent site.
This is not something to be proud of.
This is scientifically very, very wrong.”
###############################################3

This is wrong. The “raw” data still exists. The raw data is used
like ANY SAMPLE to make an estimate or prediction: we predict
as all spatial stats does “what would we likely observe at UNSAMPLED
locations” to do that we use the sampled data to create a regression.
#######################################333
Any true set of recordings makes allowance for the fact that temperatures very from minute to minute from site to site and that due to known weather variations sites do not have to match each other in step.

A) there is no “true” set of recordings. there are records of measurements. period. We predict a monthly average, not an hourly
or minute average. The temperature changes micro second by micro second. but we are not predicting that. we are predicting monthly tmax
and monthly tmin. and the average of these two. Nothing more or less.

What Mosher alludes to is pure chicanery.
Any set of sample sites that agrees this perfectly means they are not real temperature recordings anyway in any form.

####################################

Bizzare. The sites dont match perfectly.

#############################
It is the Cowtan and Way Kriging experience over again.
You must be able to pick sites that do not agree with each other in any sample.
A) you can.

Try it on the raw data Steven. See if they all move the same way whether you use 2 or 50,000.
I will guarantee they don’t.
Take your modified data and prove they all link perfectly.

No they dont MATCH read harder

“E) Accuracy is a vague term.”
No it is a very accurate term

Wrong again. Suppose I record the temperature to a single
digit. 32.1 is that Accurate? if the true measure is 32. then
it is accurate to .1C. is that Accurate? it depends. The real question is is it accurate enough FOR A PURPOSE. if my purpose is to decide whether to wear a jacket or not I can accept a measure that is good to 5 or 10 degrees!! if I am controlling a chemical process I may need more accuracy.

“for example pick 110 PRISTINE sites in the US
(CRN) and predict the rest of the country
you can for example 1000’s of “bad” sites.”

So in your system bad sites are just as accurate as pristine sites.
That alone makes none of them pristine any longer and all of them bad

WRONG.

You take 100 perfect sites. They predict the US average will be
74.5 F

You now average the 20,000 “bad” sites. GUESS WHAT
their average will be very close to 74.5F in spite of their
collective biases and inaccuracies. None of those 20000 will
be free of error but collectively the biases and errors tend to cancel.
thats testable and true.

So take 100 perfect. Predict The prediction is 74.5F
Now test the prediction
take the 20K average them
answer.. 74.55 F like that get it?.

“You take 100 perfect sites. They predict the US average will be
74.5 F

You now average the 20,000 “bad” sites. GUESS WHAT
their average will be very close to 74.5F in spite of their
collective biases and inaccuracies. None of those 20000 will
be free of error but collectively the biases and errors tend to cancel.
that’s testable and true.”

Seems to me that would only be true if the 20,000 “bad” sites had biases and inaccuracies for essentially random reasonsand also were located in a pattern very similar to but merely more dense than the 100 “perfect” sites.

“Seems to me that would only be true if the 20,000 “bad” sites had biases and inaccuracies for essentially random reasonsand also were located in a pattern very similar to but merely more dense than the 100 “perfect” sites.”

It doesnt matter what SEEMS to you.
The simple fact is you can predict the 20000 bad sites from the 100 good sites.

WHY?

1. The bad sites are not that bad
2. Where they may be bad the errors TEND to offset.

Understand, the definition of GOOD site has never been TESTED
in the field in a rigorous way. such that the difference between good and bad can established. In other words “bad” sites still can be good enough.

My first impressions are that this book merits reflective reading. On Doubt and Uncertainty there are really two separate issues – identifying changes occurring over recent times and the consequences of increasing CO2 levels for tropospheric temperatures. D&U focuses on the former. My interest has been with the latter. It’s expressible in mathematical terms and the growing question in my mind has become, has climate science reached the Pauli criterion of not even being wrong?

I await the day when the D&U aspects of CS theory are as thoroughly taken to task by those versed in quantitative reasoning and uncommitted to current memes.

How can well-accepted physics produce the wrong answer? We mapped out the architecture of their climate models and discovered that while the physics appears to be correct, the climate scientists applied it wrongly. Most of the projected warming comes from two specific mistakes.

Lost is the culture where repeated observations matter and where no authority, and no opinion, is higher than the data.

When climate model output disagrees with data, the models are wrong and the mistakes come from lack of knowledge about the science of climate. There is one or more things about climate that are really important that they really do not understand.

I have only read one chapter in detail. Based on what I have read about BEST and other reconstructions, I think that the chapter conclusions are likely to withstand criticism, even though I think the BEST team have done better than Alan Longhurst thinks they have done. BEST has been much discussed here at ClimateEtc.

This is not an easy field for one person to read about and summarize in one book. I hope that we can devote some time to the other chapters. I feel a lot of respect for Alan Longhurst for attempting a survey in a relatively small volume, and for reading such a lot of reference material. Is there a single volume that is a better introduction? Possibly the scientific portions (not the summaries for policy makers) of IPCC AR(5)?

A) Sea level increase is hard to measure.
B) Linear predictions (skeptics do these ) are no good.
C) The IPCC do a fair job
D) But UNCERTAINTY…

E) Despite uncertainty, we are already Living in the wrong places.
F) But Corals

The basic argument is this. measuring and predicting sea level increase is a hard thing to do. Poor records, many adjustments, too short satellite records.. you cant trust a simple linear prediction.. it could be worse..

So all knowledge of the future is undermined.

Looking at the past and present we see that we are already living in dangerous areas, except for coral atolls, they adapt . The problem is we picked the wrong places to live.

##########################

Flip the argument around

1) Given we picked unstable coastal areas to live.
2) An uncertain science suggests things will generally get worse
in a warming world.
3. Therefore, do what you can to keep a bad situation from becoming worse

I don’t think exploring the thought instead of the format is what he wants to do. Everybody else saw the explanation for the exclamation points but it was just too good to pass up as non-productive ridicule.

What’s odd is that there are serious minded types who believe a record of maxima and minima, fiddled or not, can possibly be a record of “temperature”, disregarding cloud, humidity, wind, duration etc. The rest of the global temp search is merely odd, but the min/max thing is just too silly. Do these experts ever step into a paddock or even open a window?

A record of something is a record of that thing. It is not a record of something related to that thing because it is “best available”. What you don’t know, you don’t know. Shouldn’t need saying of course, but these days…

We statistical types certainly believe a reliable estimate of a global temp index can constructed. It’s really not that hard… It just has error bars.

I am concerned, however, that all the adjustments I have seen have made the overall warming trend greater. Can anyone cite a major revamp of a sfc temp data set that made the temp trend lower? Could be… I am a casual observer.

I would prefer to see error corrections that fall more randomly in a normal distribution around the mean. Every time you flip the coin, it comes up heads. After a while, you begin to doubt the coin.

I am concerned, however, that all the adjustments I have seen have made the overall warming trend greater. Can anyone cite a major revamp of a sfc temp data set that made the temp trend lower? Could be… I am a casual observer.

In all SST studies adjustments COOL the record.

Understand THAT

for 70% of the planet the adjustments GO IN ONE DIRECTION:
COOLING
for 30% of the record the adjustments go in the other direction:
Warming.

The NET EFFECT of ALL ADJUSTMENTS is to
COOL THE RECORD

Now, where I ask you is there a skeptic who demands to see an SST record where adjustments WARM the record.

here is your mistake: expecting corrections to center on ZERO
that is the least likely outcome

for 70% of the planet the adjustments GO IN ONE DIRECTION:
COOLING
for 30% of the record the adjustments go in the other direction:
Warming.

The NET EFFECT of ALL ADJUSTMENTS is to
COOL THE RECORD”

Ah, you’re being disingenuous – mendacious even – again, Mosher. You are entirely dodging the point, as is your custom.

It appears that the vast majority of the 70% of COOLING adjustments occur BEFORE a certain date, and the vast majority of the 30% of the WARMING adjustments occur AFTER that date, thus amplifying the gradient of warming trend by a very considerable amount.

So why don’t you repost your 70% / 30% assertion, this time telling us what proportion of the adjustments occurred during which time periods – let’s say decadal for starters?

One of my questions remains unanswered…. Has there ever been a significant set of adjustments applied to GISS or Hadcrut that resulted in a lower rate of the warming trend for the global temp index in the undated version?

I’ve been told many times by skeptics that every time a set of adjustments are done to the surface data that the net effect is a greater warming trend. This is what I was referring to when I expressed statistical concern over the one-sided effect of adjustments.

My first problem is not with any cooling or warming, of actual climate or of statistical record. (I dare say our Holocene epoch has consisted of nothing but such blips.) My first problem is that the thing measured (min/max) is not the thing desired to be known (temp). Of course, that’s just the first prob.

In determining a global temp now you have more resources to help you arrive at a muddy conclusion which is at least a conclusion (maybe). But in determining past temps, global or local?

Consider Australia’s and the Southern Hemisphere’s highest official daily max (Oodnadatta, Jan 2 1960, 50.7°C (123°F), Maximum/Minimum Thermometer in Standard Stevenson Screen). What was useful for me was to check the days around that temp. They were close to the record in what was very likely to have been a cloudless period. So, helped by some anecdotes and reportage, I conclude that it was hellishly hot in that part of Oz in early Jan 1960. It is barely scientific to talk of “hellishly hot” – but it is not scientific at all to dwell on min/max as if that could tell the story of a day’s weather or temp. When several high min/max readings occur in consecutive days, it’s reasonable to guess that there was a lot of heat outside the peaks, and that’s when min/max get a bit more useful.

Sydney’s record max of 2013 was unsustained and highly localised, though that summer was indeed hostile for a bit. The record it just broke, that of 1939, was part of a heatwave which remains Australia’s most lethal natural event. (Interestingly, Sydney’s seldom mentioned 1960 heatwave was localised but far more sustained than any before or since. What was it about 1960? I remember swimming lots.)

I speak as a total skep who could not care less if the planet is warming a bit. Old min/max readings are interesting, numbers and stats are interesting, statisticians are interesting people. But what you don’t know…you just don’t know!

These tend to be localised and short lived. It wa a Spanish heat plume that caused the ‘record’ 1 July temperature at heathrow airport but to illustrate your point the summer, despite that one event, was actually cooler than normal.

Tonyb, there had been very high temps here north of Sydney that summer, but no records and not very hot on the day of the new Sydney record. Other Sydney stations recorded a very high or record max (I checked), but it’s interesting that the weather station in the middle of Sydney Harbour, just a paddle from the main BoM station at the Observatory, was not just a few degrees cooler (as it normally is). It wasn’t even heatwave conditions out there. (I checked!)

Sydney got quick relief after its new record, and the summer settled down for most us after that, though too late for a good bamboo shooting. God knows what they’d say about a repeat of the 1960 heat in Sydney. It set no daily records but it just wouldn’t go away. It would be a real hipster Armageddon now, then it was just a four day super-stinker. Since I preferred swimming in Kogarah Bay to sums at St Pat’s, I hardly minded. And doing the old fried egg on the footpath trick was a thrill.

We’ve had shockers of summers in Oz recently, 2009 for example, but 1896 and 1939 still seem to lead the pack for shockingness. 1939 with its fires and heat deaths was so unreasonable as to be a La Nina flanked by neutral years. Can’t win sometimes.

The mono atomic molecules (O2 and! N2) comprising the bulk of the atmosphere are transparent both to incoming solar and outgoing thermal radiation. while the radiatively active, or greenhouse gases (GHGs) are those whose molecules are excited to a higher energy level when impacted by a photon within one or more characteristic wave bands.

Ok, except for the weird mono atomic molecules (O2 and! N2). Properly called homonuclear diatomics, but other than showing that the author is kinda clueless about the field, no harm here, but this is followed by the clanger which tells Eli that this is another Sky Dragon

This energy is then re emitted almost instantaneously as
the molecules return to their low energy state, thus increasing the temperature of the atmosphere and so radiating some energy back to space.

Ah no. What happens is that the excited molecule collides with O2 or N2 (or whatever else) and converts it’s vibrational energy to kinetic energy. The internal excited energy of the molecule is transformed into thermal motion of the molecules nearby through collisions. This takes about a microsecond, a millionth of a second and is roughly a million times more likely than the molecule directly emitting IR light.

In the same way unexcited greenhouse gas molecules can be excited by collisions into a state where they emit. It turns out that the rate at which excited molecules can form and their emission spectrum is determined by the temperature, so by looking at the spectrum at any location we can tell the temperature of the layer. If we look above the atmosphere we can measure the temperature and the level at which radiation at a particular wavelength is emitted to space.More Detail at RR but suffice it to say the claim that re-emission is immediate is a pretty good indicator that somebunny has a high DK number

This is a bit confusing. In this section of the book he was discussing top of atmosphere were re-radiation would occur more frequently than collisions. But, it’s not clear in the paragraph you cite if he was still discussing TOA or not.

The chief bunny rabett says, “Ah no. What happens is that the excited molecule collides with O2 or N2 (or whatever else) and converts it’s vibrational energy to kinetic energy. The internal excited energy of the molecule is transformed into thermal motion of the molecules nearby through collisions. This takes about a microsecond, a millionth of a second and is roughly a million times more likely than the molecule directly emitting IR light.”

Only off by a factor of ~3 orders of magnitude. According to climate denier Princeton physicist Will Happer, it is on the order of one BILLION times more likely for CO2 to transfer quanta of E via collisions with N2/O2 in the troposphere than via relaxation and emission of a photon.

Bunny hole continues, “In the same way unexcited greenhouse gas molecules can be excited by collisions into a state where they emit. It turns out that the rate at which excited molecules can form and their emission spectrum is determined by the temperature, so by looking at the spectrum at any location we can tell the temperature of the layer. If we look above the atmosphere we can measure the temperature and the level at which radiation at a particular wavelength is emitted to space”

Ah no, the bending mode transitions of e.g. CO2 are FIXED line-emissions centered ALWAYS at 15 microns! The surrounding kinetic temperature of the atmosphere from 0-100km is a MINIMUM of 220K in the tropopause (per 1976 US Std Atm), much WARMER than the so-called “partial equivalent blackbody emitting temperature” of CO2 15 micron emission (if CO2 was a TRUE BB, an emitting temperature equivalent of 193K) all the way from the surface to the edge of space! Thus, CO2 is absorbing/emitting as many 15 micron photons as it possibly can ALL the way and at every single geopotential height ALL the way from 0-100km, not limited by the surrounding kinetic temperature of the atmosphere which is >193K all the way from 0-100km!

Oh, and the quanta of E transferred preferrentially by CO2 to N2/O2 INCREASE the kinetic expansion, rising, and COOLING of these warmed air parcels, which thereby ACCELERATES convective COOLING of the surface.

“That is why you can for example pick 110 PRISTINE sites in the US
(CRN) and predict the rest of the country: Including
100s of other pristine sites ( RCRN) and 1000’s of “bad” sites.
What’s it tell you when you can start with 60 samples and get
one time series… then add 300 and get the same,,, then add
3000 and get the same…. then add 30000 and get the same?
whats that tell you about sampling?
Whats it tell you when you can pick 5000 and then predict any
other 5000 or 10000?”

Um, it tells you that the sites do match perfectly?

“You take 100 perfect sites. They predict the US average will be
74.5 F.You now average the 20,000 “bad” sites. GUESS WHAT
their average will be 74.5F”.

Um, it tells you that the sites do match perfectly?

“Create a synthetic field of realistic climate time series data.
For that you have a Known average of the field.
Take a sub sample.
Use various method to estimate the full field given the sample.”

“What’s it tell you when you can start with 60 samples and get
one time series… then add 300 and get the same,,, then add
3000 and get the same…. then add 30000 and get the same?
whats that tell you about sampling?”

Simple Steven, you are intelligent, it says the sites match perfectly.
Why state the above and then write rubbish like “the sites do not match perfectly”
How can you, as an intelligent scientist do this?
If sites are, as Nick Stokes glowingly asserts
[“The public expects that people who actually know what they are doing will give the best estimate they can of global temperature. And they do. That involves detecting and correcting inhomogeneities.”]
totally adjusted to remove discrepancies [ inhomogeneities to us , right]
and every sample you can take agrees in lockstep as you state above ,then the sites must match perfectly, Zeke would not leave any inhomogeneities in, would he?

I wish some of the scientist types here , including Judith, could take this assertion of yours, and Cowtan and Ways, of perfection when you run your algorithms and expose it for the scientific cruelty it is.
Measurements must vary, must have errors, must have cloudy days when areas do not agree with surrounding areas. You cannot wipe this variability and difference out in the name of homogenization.
It is not science to cover up data that does not agree with you or your “recipe”.
It has another name but I am not a Steyn type.
Are there others out there who can explain this to Steven.

JimD, thank you for your reply. BEST detect and correct for inhomogeneities.
Once done there are none left. The imperfections have been removed.
Once there are no imperfections something is perfect.
QED.
This does not mean the data is correct but it is correct to say that such data allows Steven to make the laughable claim that one can take any bit of the data, in any order, Pristine data, Dirty data, dogs breakfast data and have it all give the same perfect result.
And then he says the sites do not match perfectly?
Unbelievable.
Where are the support troops. How can you and he write such tripe.

“JimD, thank you for your reply. BEST detect and correct for inhomogeneities.
Once done there are none left. The imperfections have been removed.
Once there are no imperfections something is perfect.
QED.”

The imperfections will never be removed. Period. What you aim for
is LESS bad, closer to the truth.

################################
This does not mean the data is correct but it is correct to say that such data allows Steven to make the laughable claim that one can take any bit of the data, in any order, Pristine data, Dirty data, dogs breakfast data and have it all give the same perfect result.”

##############################

Wrong. That is not the claim.

1. Take the 110 sites blessed by WUWT as “pristine”. They
are built and mainted to a spec.
2. Using them construct a spatial model to predict the temp
at other locations ( in the US for this demonstration
3. Predict the temps at the locations of so called “bad” stations.
4. Your predictions will match the actual, with some error
but nothing remarkable.
OR
1. Construct an average from the 100 pristine sites
2. Construct an average from the bad sites
3. compare them
4. You’ll not see any substantial difference.

So they match, as I said, you inferred perfectly… nothing is perfect son

The author has clearly spent considerable time on the oceans away from the shore. This will give you an entirely different understanding of the earth’s climate than those that live almost exclusively ashore, mostly in artificial cities, learning about climate from books.

Alan Longhurst thank you for appearing on this thread. I’m an English major and published author and admire your writing style. There are however quite a few errata that seem to show a lack of careful proof-reading. Perhaps repeated exposure to your drafts has made your readers too close to see the slip-ups. Would you like to be notified of these and if so, to which address?

The evidence concerning changing conditions in the past at decadal to millennial scales assures us that even if anthropogenic effects prove to be negligible, we can have great confidence that the climate of the 21st century will not resemble those of the 19th or 20th centuries. (pg 235)

I completely agree with this statement. We could bulldoze every single coal-burning power station today, and we could extract and sequester every anthropogenic molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the climate will still change. There seems to be an implication that if humans would just stop emitting CO2 that the climate would somehow settle back into its “natural, static state” (i.e., the handle of the hockey stick). The sea level, the global temperature and general weather patterns are going to change no matter what we do. So there is a need to make policy to address adaptation. On the other hand, mitigation policies seem to be based on the assumption that “CO2 is climate and climate is CO2.” I’m not against mitigation, we should not be releasing CO2 if it is going to exacerbate or make worse the change that would occur anyway. But most mitigation seems to be based on a CO2 control-knob phantasy.

There’s precious little evidence that CO2 is powerful enough to exacerbate warming changes, and only a little more that it can ameliorate cooling change. The discrepancy in the evidences is because cooling is unequivocally damaging, and warming is not even hypothetically damaging, except at unprecedented, impossible from CO2, extremes.
=================

A melting Arctic: The world is skating on thin ice
…
The race for the Arctic is on in more ways than one, creating new environmental, human and geopolitical risks in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments—one in which no nation is fully prepared to operate. Consequences to the future of our planet are huge. This month researchers in Sweden published a study showing how melting sea in the Arctic is encouraging methane emissions—exacerbating climate change and the warming of the atmosphere. That’s because the ice acts like a windshield reflector to the sun’s warming rays, and without it the oceans absorb more heat.

Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Society got all excited about a suddenly melty Arctic back in 1817. Then the bloody place froze up worse than Windows Vista.

Jim, I like it that the cost is going to be an extra $43 trillion by the end of next century. Odd numbers like 43 or 97 are so much more convincing. Clearly this has been a study by experts. Now, we just need a survey on how people feel about all this. My guess is that 93.7% of respondents will think it’s time to tackle melty ice. And they’ll be the nice empathic ones with emotional literacy.

Gawd…don’t you just yearn for an adult now and then? It’s like we’re stuck in some creche with brats showing us their colouring-in and Lego models non-stop. And they’re the ones getting paid.

If the rich people in the world share their wealth, then everyone will be poor and no one will have enough to promote development and create jobs.

The best thing we can do for the poor is to help them get abundant, low cost energy, so they can raise their standard of living closer to our standard of living. They should be able to buy from us and produce more that we can buy from them.

Limiting the poor to windmills and solar and telling them that the worst thing for the world is for them to be able to afford what we have is criminal and genocide.

The strangest part is that this is being enacted at a time of massive fossil fuel production and consumption by the very parties preaching against fossil fuels. Germany, that new-old lignite digger, might at least have placed its stupid solar panels in a third world country where the sun do shine. Instead of at 50+ degrees north! Did they think the atmosphere has borders?

I suspect that when we engage in the climate wars we are also involving ourselves in a commercial war between coal/nukes and oil/gas where all parties try to flash their green credentials to win by sentiment what they can’t win otherwise. The solar panels and whirlygigs are the hyper-expensive decor for Carbon Has Talent.

Coal is the bad boy, all snips ‘n snails and puppy dog tails. And it has been rising irresistibly in the market place even as it plummets in the virtual market place where you can make anything cheaper or more expensive using the same mock-science that brought us that accelerating sea level rise nobody can find.

As “oldfossil” remarks, there are too many – to my considerable embarrassment. My fault, obviously, but the problem is that the text has been on the stocks much too long, evolving progressively as I explored the literature over the last 3 years or so. I am currently going very, very carefully over a print-out and, when done, I will ask Judy to re-post it. Later, I shall also have some copies printed as v cheap paperbacks for distribution to anybody who wants them.

I’m glad someone picked up the point that there will always be climate surprises in store for us, no matter what we do about CO2: I’m surprised that I have not seen anywhere the obvious conclusion stated – that we are evolving our way of life as if the climate was stable and unchanging, and whichever way it goes in the coming century, we – or rather some of you – ware going to be very uncomfortable. The more complex our society becomes, the more vulnerable it is to unforeseen climate conditions.

The more complex our society becomes, the more vulnerable it is to unforeseen climate conditions.

You might want to modify that statement. There seems to be plenty of evidence that our increasingly “complex” society is progressively less vulnerable to climate over time than comparatively “simple” societies.

Stupid decisions (building on floodplains, deserts, and barrier islands, for example) are not related to complexity and are driven by other factors.

Right, opluso, a wealthier, more complex society will be better able to withstand all the projections from the effects of AnthroCO2. The inevitable climate change it won’t be able to withstand as well is eventual cooling, for that will destroy wealth.
=============

Heh, you and your hiatus. It’s dawning on a few alarmists that in order to maintain their faith in high sensitivity, they have to argue that we’d be cooling now without anthropogenic CO2. What’s really funny is to watch the ones who so argue without the dawning.
=============

Kim, Picasso depicted us as variously blue, rose, cubically shaped, and crystalline. You seem to be trying to depict climate scientists, but so far you don’t seem to have found any poetic depiction requiring fewer than ten words.

Mr. Longhurst,
Thank you for your work and willingness to share in such a public forum.
Some might/should acknowledge that even if not in total agreement with all aspects of your offering, you’ve done ‘the work’.

@Alan Longhurst: Alan, I haven’t commented on your book per se so far, partly because I don’t have anything concrete to say about it and partly because I’m a lot junior to you and perhaps therefore less wise. Send me an email (google my home page) and we can talk about it.

The seas around Britain are unusually cool this year after a cooler than average summer. Its around 1C cooler than normal and fully 3C cooler than last year.
We have also had a lot of jellyfish. Are both species following currents, food, instinct?

There is accumulating evidence, once someone looked, that AnthroCO2 will induce change in a net positive manner. This whole thing is backwards, and the perverted view was convenient, for a few.
============================

Rob, since you’ve thrown down the glove about my comments being “meaningless,” could you please be a little more specific about what makes this comment about RSS/UAH vs. SST meaningless? It has two parts, theoretical prediction and experimental confirmation. Are you saying both are meaningless, or only one, or what?

Vaughan–read more carefully. I didn’t write that ALL your comments are meaningless. Increasing temperature does not justify the conclusion that the climate will be net worse for humans and certainly not for any specific country.

I grew up in the 6th coldest city in the USA. I have no fear of cooling. Lol. My mother made a rule, no rides to school until it got to 15 below zero. And then the Edsel would never start, so we walked anyway.

Alan, AnthroCO2 is an amazing, if inadvertent, geo-engineering blessing. Its great greening and mild warming would be miraculous if not so predictable. So we’re taught to fear a warmer, greener, earth? Our children will understand better.
=======================

Its great greening and mild warming would be miraculous if not so predictable. So we’re taught to fear a warmer, greener, earth?

Good to see you moving on from WG1 (physical basis) to WG2 (impacts and vulnerabilities), kim. WG2 deals with both the (likely) winners and losers. Only those who view the world through polarized glasses describe it as all one or all the other.

The problem with having winners and losers is that in the course of a century, the losing species may go extinct but the winning species don’t provide immediate replacements for the extinct species, the winners are merely better off. The net effect of abrupt climate change therefore is to reduce the number of species. Increasing the number of species is a much longer term proposition, happening gradually after mass extinctions whether major or minor.

This is just as true in the vegetable kingdom, where some plants such as kudzu and poison ivy thrive on more CO2 (up to a point) while others such as wheat and rice that are currently at their optimal level find additional CO2 toxic because higher CO2 levels increase ethylene (C2H4) synthesis in those plants which inhibits seed set (production of seeds).

I’m not sure what study you are relying on to show harm above present levels. Perhaps one of those studies where they studied the effects of increased co2 and chose to simulate the drought conditions they decided would go with it.

TE, how many of those retired people have to work outside in the summer there? That is a factor in the lifespan when you measure it by warmer and colder nations. Productivity also goes down with warmth leading to less wealth in general too.

I’m surprised that I have not seen anywhere the obvious conclusion stated – that we are evolving our way of life as if the climate was stable and unchanging, and whichever way it goes in the coming century, we – or rather some of you – ware going to be very uncomfortable.

The climate of the past million years was extreme, compared to the most recent ten thousand years. We have advanced much in the most recent ten thousand years because the temperature and sea level were regulated in tighter bounds. We could stay in the same places and develop. This is the new normal. We will get cycles in the future just like the cycles of the past ten thousand years. Ocean Levels and Ocean Currents have evolved to the current state and the current state supports warm periods like the Roman, Medieval and Modern Warm Period and it supports cold periods like the Little Ice Age.

China will put in place cap-and-trade and we can depend on them that this will limit their emissions – of course we can. Of course, there are no specifics here, just hopium.

From the article:
…
China has been developing and carrying out smaller cap-and-trade programs for at least three years. In 2012, it started pilot programs in seven provinces, intended to serve as tests for a national program.

Last week, Chinese officials met in Los Angeles with top environmental officials from California, which has enacted an aggressive cap-and-trade program. People who attended the talks said they were meant to pave the way for a possible linkage of the Chinese and California cap-and-trade systems.

…

The Chinese announcement comes less than two months after Mr. Obama unveiled his signature climate change policy, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations that would force power plants to curb their carbon emissions. The rules could shut down hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired power plants. They have drawn fire from Republicans and coal-state lawmakers, but international negotiators say Mr. Obama’s regulations have also helped break a longstanding deadlock between the United States and China on climate change.
…

I asked this before but never got much in the way of answers…I’ll rephrase and ask again…

RE: temperature measurement and data adjustments…chapter 4

… What are the pluses and minuses of sat temps vs sfc thermometer data sets?

… Sat temps have risen more in the past 12 months but less in the last 35 years than sfc thermometers. Why are they different ? Is the difference error of measurement or can it be explained otherwise? Would any differences in behavior be expected?

… The USA started a pristine database in 2004. How does it compare to Giss, Hadcrut, Best, Uah, Rss? Have other countries set up similar surface networks? (I answered this myself somewhat showing a 95% monthly correlation between BEST and CRN 2005-2013 with no significant difference in trend.)

… Many temperatures adjustments have been made. Has there ever been a major update to GISS or HadCrut (new version #) where the overall temperature trend was reduced (cooler). Skeptics have claimed to me that “adjustments have all raised the trend”. I’m not talking about individual adjustments. I’m talking about the overall global temp index.

… What is your estimate of error in our ability to estimate global temp index?

… If you were global climate czar with current funding levels, where would you spend more and where would you reduce funding?

@Roscoe Shaw: … Sat temps have risen more in the past 12 months but less in the last 35 years than sfc thermometers. Why are they different ? Is the difference error of measurement or can it be explained otherwise? Would any differences in behavior be expected?

Answered here.. Bottom line: Theory, confirmed by observation, predicts that the lower troposphere will track sea surface, not land. No significant difference expected, nor observed, hence no need for any explanation besides that in the theoretical prediction.

But GISS and Hadcrut are global temp indexes just like Sat data….weighted by grid point. I don’t see how they should be different. They all assign temps to grid points, all have 70% ocean. Lower trop should correlate near perfectly to sfc temp due to lapse rates.

So, I still don’t understand why sat and sfc obs should diverge. No difference expected…but a difference has been observed since 2000

All I see is VP’s graph is confirmation that whatever caused the pause, it happened after 2005, and that the most likely culprit is the actual negative phase (index numbers are predominately negative) of the PDO, which is characterized by La Nina dominance.

There was a comparison of maps against GISTEMP here recently, and the patterns agreed on the current global anomalies, except for the satellite map’s complete lack of an East Pacific El Nino warm anomaly as of about July, and that was probably already the largest anomaly in GISTEMP. Given that the satellites had a very large 1998 El Nino, this is surprising.

Chapter 3:
*The mean period between solar minima is roughly ten solar cycles, around 108 years, not 200 years.
*El Nino occur regularly around one year after each sunspot minimum, exactly where the solar wind is slowest. Some solar cycles also have a major low in the solar wind at sunspot maximum, and where that happens, there will also be an El Nino episode or conditions. That should tell you that solar wind effects on the NAO/AO and associated teleconnections like ENSO dominate strongly over the effects of solar irradiance variability through the sunspot cycle.
*The AMO warm mode is driven by increase negative NAO/AO, that’s from weaker solar wind states, solar wind density and pressure has declined from the mid 1990’s. The idea that solar irradiance follows the AMO is specious, and has the sign of forcing reversed.

the greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true

What then are the chances of this government-funded alarmist Consensus that so favours government expansion, being true ?

“Very unlikely”, in the official terminology (<10%).

And considering the widespread contempt for the scientific method revealed by the deafening silence and official coverups following Climategate, and general ostracism of dissenters, maybe even "Exceptionally unlikely" (<1%).

“Transport of warm water on this scale may be expected to be directly related to the pattern of low and high pressure cells in the atmosphere. A stubborn, positive state of the NAO characterised the final decades of the 20th century, and was associated with a pulse of Atlantic water into the Arctic Basin that significantly reduced ice coverage.”

The reverse. The NAO became increasingly negative from the mid 1990’s at the same as Arctic warming accelerated, and low summer ice extent is always associated with negative NAO in summer months.

It is not increased solar irradiance that warms the Arctic, but low solar wind periods causing increased negative NAO/AO episodes.

The two most critical parts of this book, solar forcing of the AMO, and Arctic temperatures versus climate forcing, are backwards. That’s typical.

Even if CO2 was a significant greenhouse gas, which it is not, man is only responsible for around ~4% of the increase per IPCC (not sure of exact number). So how could we possibly make an impact by reducing CO2? Probably the bogus computer models have come up with a way. Garbage in- garbage out.